Why Rippling stands apart: The power of consolidation in financial management

Gone are the days when the value of financial management tools was only in the greater accuracy and compliance they delivered. While these things certainly still matter, finance teams are now expected to deliver high-ROI strategic insights, allocate capital responsibly, and drive cost efficiencies—including within the finance org itself.

Rippling Spend is an innovative suite of products that builds all your financial management tools on top of a single source of truth for employee data. Spend leverages the power of a company’s employee graph: employee departments, locations, titles and more. Plus, it integrates with other Rippling products, making it uniquely positioned to help Finance teams uplevel how they deliver value across their organization, making your existing team more efficient than ever.

It also combines all your financial tools—expense management, bill pay, corporate cards, payroll, and headcount planning—into one unified platform. Rippling is the only solution that does this—and syncs Finance with HR and IT tools—transforming how finance teams will approach their work in the future.

Most financial management tools are fragmented

Software sprawl is a problem for many orgs, and Finance is no exception—the average team uses 40+ different tools. That means many teams spend time stitching together data and reconciling differences to understand their complete financial picture—a setup that’s painful for everyone.

Employees have to go to different apps to track things like paying bills to suppliers, finding the right person to approve their expenses, or checking if their headcount is in budget. And in the background, admins are constantly updating employee information and access controls in an attempt to keep it all in sync across various financial tools.

At Rippling, we have hundreds of changes in our org chart each month—new hires, departures, changes in level or reporting line, and more. We don’t have the team size to keep this information up-to-date across a large number of siloed apps—plus, we need our teams to spend their time on work that adds more value than that. We needed a better way, and Rippling Spend is it.

Rippling offers an integrated solution

Rippling Spend includes expense management, bill pay, corporate cards, headcount planning, and will soon also include travel and procurement. It’s the only solution that lets you manage all of your employee spend in one place.

While new finance solutions have entered the market over the past few years, they all have gaps—some focus on travel, others don’t have bill pay, and so on. And none of Rippling’s competitors connect all your Finance tools to a single source of truth for employee data so you can manage the largest cost for any company: headcount.

That’s how Rippling disrupts the market. It has the most comprehensive platform of financial tools, plus the ability to use the power of employee data—which no other all-in-one financial management solution has—to infuse its tools with superpowers other products just can’t match.

4 ways our team uses Rippling Spend

If Rippling Spend's all-in-one benefits sound abstract, here are some specific examples of how we use our own product to support a 2,000+ employee, high-growth company with a very lean finance team:

1. Automated org chart changes: Every time there is a change in our org chart, it seamlessly ripples through Rippling Spend. When a manager changes, all their new reports’ expenses are automatically routed to this new person. If there is a new hire at a Director level or higher, they automatically get a corporate card. If someone leaves, their corporate card is shut off and reimbursements are processed with their last pay run.
2. Hyper-custom policies. By leveraging all the employee data Rippling has, we can create extremely granular policies to ensure we stay on-budget and compliant. For example, our spend policy—spend limits and what they can be spent on—is very different for a sales executive entertaining clients versus a customer support specialist. In Bill Pay, any spend above a certain amount automatically requires a multi-step approval including the head of the team. Plus, we can pivot and base these rules on any employee attribute—their department, location, seniority, and much more.
3. Custom workflows. Because it’s powered by employee data, Rippling understands the structure of your company and the relationships between employees, which unlocks some awesome use cases that are only possible in Rippling. For example, we have a role for a finance partner for the marketing team, who’s responsible for tracking and managing budgets for the marketing org. Certain requests, like spend above a certain threshold, adding headcount, or compensation exceptions, automatically get routed to the correct finance partner for approval. And what’s more, because Rippling updates with org chart changes in real time, if the finance partner leaves, their replacement is automatically reinserted into the approval flow.
4. Unified finance data and insights. Rippling brings all the employee data scattered across your finance stack into one place and links it with data from almost anywhere else in the company. This empowers ROI-driven decision making. For example, by linking our monthly Tableau spend to our employee data and associated login info using our IT Cloud app management capabilities, we discovered a large number of unused seats, identified which employees don’t need Tableau access, and captured real cost savings at contract renewal. We’re now repeating this process with all of our other software vendors.

Rippling is the future of financial management

Rippling’s overall company mission is to automate the entire company back office—across HR, Finance, and IT. And the proof points are clear: According to a third-party analysis by Forrester*, the average Rippling customer operates with 40% fewer HR, Finance, and IT professionals than other companies.

That said, even though cost savings associated with a lower headcount are compelling, Rippling Spend offers many other powerful benefits. It allows our team to spend less time on administrative work and more time on interesting, impactful problems that drive business outcomes. Outside of Finance, employees’ jobs are easier because approval flows go to the right person and are efficient and easy to monitor, which reduces red tape that slows the business down.

The future of financial management demands companies do more with less, drive efficiency throughout the business, help unlock growth, and promote high ROI decision making. Rippling Spend is uniquely positioned to help Finance teams meet these challenges. And, with some of the highest R&D spend amongst our peer companies, we are nowhere near done with adding delightful new features for our customers. There is much more to come.

See Rippling in action: Request a demo or watch a tour video.

*Methodology: Analysis conducted by Forrester Research, Inc. on behalf of Rippling in 2023