What does it take to clear thousands of hours of manual finance work every month? Ramp built a custom OCR tool with Microsoft Azure AI and Azure Document Intelligence to automate finance workflows while maintaining speed, accuracy, and security across its platform. The result: 30K hours saved monthly and 5 million receipts processed. Read the story to learn from Ramp's experience with Azure AI.
How is Ramp using Microsoft Azure AI to automate finance workflows?
Ramp uses Microsoft Azure AI services and Azure AI Document Intelligence as the backbone of its finance automation.
Here’s how it works in practice:
- Simple capture: Users text or upload a receipt or invoice directly into Ramp.
- AI-powered extraction: Azure’s AI and custom OCR automatically extract key data (amounts, dates, vendors, line items) from the documents.
- Categorization and enrichment: The system categorizes spend and enriches the data so it becomes structured, searchable information instead of a static image or PDF.
- End-to-end workflow: That structured data flows into Ramp’s expense management and bill-pay tools, helping automate approvals, reimbursements, and bookkeeping.
This approach helps Ramp deliver fast, accurate, and secure finance workflows at scale, while keeping the user experience as simple as “swipe the card and text the receipt.”
What measurable impact has Azure AI had on Ramp’s operations?
Ramp has seen clear, measurable impact from its Azure AI–powered automation:
- 30,000 hours of manual work saved every month by eliminating repetitive finance tasks like filing receipts and processing invoices.
- 5 million receipts processed monthly, along with about 400,000 invoices, using its custom OCR solution built on Azure AI Document Intelligence.
- Per-transaction time savings: each automated receipt can save up to a minute; even at 15 seconds saved per reimbursement or receipt, the cumulative time savings are substantial.
- Faster development cycles: Ramp’s lean engineering team built and deployed the custom OCR solution in under a week using Azure AI services and Microsoft Visual Studio.
Beyond the numbers, customers report that the biggest benefit is time back to focus on growing their business instead of chasing receipts or manually paying multi-line invoices.
Why did Ramp choose Microsoft Azure as its strategic AI and DevOps platform?
Ramp chose Microsoft Azure as a strategic platform for several business and technical reasons:
- Performance and reliability: Azure provides the reliability and low latency needed for real-time finance workflows, which is important for both fast-growing and enterprise customers.
- Cost and scalability: Azure’s cost profile and ability to scale with demand support Ramp’s rapid growth and high transaction volumes (e.g., 5 million receipts and 400,000 invoices monthly).
- Prebuilt AI capabilities: Azure AI Document Intelligence and other prebuilt models help Ramp’s teams stay unblocked and build quickly, instead of creating everything from scratch.
- Strong partner support: The Microsoft Unified team provides fast, informed responses, which Ramp cites as a key factor in being able to move quickly and confidently.
- Developer productivity: By moving DevOps to Azure and using GitHub Copilot, GitHub Actions, and hosted runners, Ramp’s engineers ship code faster, run CI pipelines in parallel, and avoid managing internal CI infrastructure.
- Enterprise-grade ecosystem: Integrations with products like Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and Microsoft Entra help Ramp serve larger enterprises with security, performance, and compliance in mind.
Together, these factors help Ramp reimagine how finance teams work, while giving both customers and internal teams more unified, efficient tools.
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