Preparing to 5x a company’s headcount overnight is daunting. It is even more challenging with an unscalable, disparate technology stack that necessitates a mountain of manual processes.

When Frank Himes joined as CFO & COO, the company needed to consolidate its tools and automate as many processes as possible before the 10-person team could onboard 40 new W-2 employees on the same day. But these were not the only obstacles that Frank was facing.

Ethical Energy was also encumbered by the daily fluctuation of its credit limit imposed by its corporate card provider, Ramp. As a solar company with longer sales cycles and large transactions, it was difficult when the business’ credit limit kept changing on a daily basis based on its cash flows. Their new spend solution also needed to provide a stable credit line.

Ethical Energy was using five software tools to manage HR, payroll, and finance. This included Ramp, Bill, Monday.com, and Google Sheets. With Rippling, Frank was able to consolidate all spend management and HRIS needs into Rippling HCM, Rippling Payroll, Rippling Spend, and Netsuite integrated with Rippling Spend. 

Frank loved the streamline effect from integrating HR with spend. For example, “The ability to reimburse employees via payroll was not something that Ramp offered. Before Rippling, we used an excel spreadsheet and an email to my payroll specialist to manually enter it into our payroll.”

“What I love about Rippling is that it’s modular. We were able to use Benefits, Spend, Payroll, HCM, and Performance management. Its flexibility and ability to grow with us has all been great.” Frank continued by saying, “Rippling is a consolidation of everything that a smaller company needs all in one place. That makes it a lot easier for an individual or a smaller team to manage. It’s a time saver.”

Rippling is a consolidation of everything that a smaller company needs all in one place. That makes it a lot easier for an individual or a smaller team to manage. It’s a time saver.

Frank Himes

CFO & COO at Ethical Energy

With the massive influx of W-2 workers, Frank needed to provision 40 new corporate cards. If Ethical Energy stayed with Ramp, this would have required the manual set up of approval flows, policies, and provisioning for each individual card, because Ramp did not offer group automations.

However, by switching to Rippling, Frank saved 15 hours within the first 90 days of onboarding the converted W-2 workers by using Rippling Supergroups. This allowed him to create an automation that issued a corporate card with individual monthly limits, restricted to gas purchases, and automatically deactivated the card upon termination of an employee.

“Ramp is exceptionally difficult for creating cards and eliminating cards in a fast fashion​​—it’s all manual. Rippling, being our HRIS system, automatically provisions a card right at the time we hire and disables the card at termination," Frank said. “The different rules that we can automatically apply to each card are also a value add. It was an unbelievable time save.”

With Ramp, Ethical Energy only had six Ramp cards due to the cumbersome management process. Frank added that “No one wanted to manage that process, to be honest. It was not scalable.” He went as far as to say that “Ramp was a ‘C’ product and Rippling is an ‘A’ product.” They now have Rippling corporate cards for virtually every person in the company.

Ramp was a ‘C’ product and Rippling is an ‘A’ product.

Frank Himes

CFO & COO at Ethical Energy

Frank leveraged Rippling to extend his consolidation of HR and finance data beyond just issuing corporate cards. Before switching to Rippling, Frank said he manually mapped approval workflows because “Ramp doesn’t know who reports to who. This created a lot more manual processes, but Rippling takes this all out.”

Rippling Spend’s integration with Rippling HCM allows it to understand employee relationships and attributes like level, department, manager, location, and tenure. “In Rippling, I can create automated approval flows for lower level managers to complete the first approval or only approval.”

Thanks to Rippling’s unified automations, Ethical Energy expects to maintain their current finance and HR headcount over the next two years, even as they 5x their volume of solar installation projects and expand their workforce. “The consolidation with Rippling has made this possible,” said Frank.

As a capital intensive business with a longer sales cycle and transactions in the $50k to $100k range, Ethical Energy’s daily cash flow could have 10x swings in either direction. This made Ramp’s daily reassessment of their credit limit a challenge. “Ramp literally changes your credit line every single day. It was a big pain point, and there was no way around it.” It would range from $41k to $95k on any given day.

By contrast, Rippling was able to offer a stable credit limit that fit the needs of the business and allowed Ethical Energy to leave Ramp completely.

• 6x more corporate cards: With Rippling’s automated card provisioning, Frank easily increased the number of cards in use from 6 to over 40 while maintaining granular visibility and control.
• 15 hours saved in 90 days: The automatic set up of policies and approval flows for Rippling cards saved Frank time.
• 5 software solutions eliminated: Monday.com, Bill, Ramp, Google sheets, and more were all consolidated into Rippling Spend, HCM, & Payroll, and an ERP.
• 5x increase in project volume, zero additional headcount: Rippling’s automations allowed Ethical Energy to consistently increase their project volume without any new finance or HR hires.