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 does Ramp use Microsoft Azure AI to automate finance workflows?
Ramp uses Microsoft Azure AI services and
Azure AI Document Intelligence to power a custom OCR (optical character recognition) solution that automates core finance workflows.
Here’s how it works in practice:
- Simple capture for users: Employees can text or upload a receipt instead of filling out traditional expense reports. Ramp’s platform takes it from there.
- Automated data extraction: Azure’s AI services automatically extract key details (merchant, date, amount, line items, etc.) from receipts and invoices.
- Categorization and enrichment: The extracted data is categorized and enriched, turning raw documents into structured, usable insights in seconds.
- Integrated finance workflows: That structured data flows into Ramp’s spend management, expense, and bill-pay tools, helping finance teams close the books faster and maintain accuracy and control.
For end users, the experience is designed to feel as simple as “swiping a card and texting the receipt,” while Azure handles the heavy lifting behind the scenes. This approach helps Ramp maintain
speed, accuracy, and security across its platform, even as it scales to serve larger enterprises.
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 automating repetitive finance tasks, Ramp frees teams to focus on higher-value work.
- 5 million receipts processed monthly: Azure AI helps Ramp handle a very high volume of receipts at scale.
- 400,000 invoices processed monthly: Multi-line invoices that once took significant time to review are now processed automatically.
- Per-transaction time savings: Each automated receipt can save up to a minute, and even a 15-second saving per reimbursement or receipt adds up quickly when multiplied by millions of transactions.
These gains translate into:
- Higher customer satisfaction: Customers spend less time chasing receipts and more time growing their business.
- Greater operational efficiency: Finance teams close books faster, and developers can build and ship features more quickly.
Overall, Azure AI helps Ramp reimagine how finance work gets done, turning previously manual workflows into streamlined, automated processes at scale.
Why did Ramp choose Microsoft Azure, and how does it support future growth?
Ramp chose Microsoft Azure as its foundation for AI and DevOps based on a mix of technical and strategic factors:
Key reasons for choosing Azure
- Reliability and low latency: Azure provides the performance needed for real-time finance workflows.
- Cost benefits: Azure’s economics support Ramp’s need to scale efficiently.
- Prebuilt AI models: Azure AI Document Intelligence offers prebuilt models that keep teams unblocked and speed up development.
- Strong support and partnership: The Microsoft Unified team provides fast, informed support, which Ramp cites as critical to growing quickly and serving enterprise customers.
How Azure supports Ramp’s growth
- Fast solution delivery: Ramp’s lean team built and deployed its custom OCR solution in under a week using Azure AI services and tools like Microsoft Visual Studio.
- Modern DevOps on Azure: Ramp has migrated DevOps processes to Azure and uses GitHub Actions and hosted runners to run CI pipelines in parallel, reduce internal CI infrastructure, and centralize logs and outputs.
- Developer productivity with GitHub Copilot: Almost every engineer uses GitHub Copilot in daily workflows, helping them ship code faster with fewer blockers.
- Enterprise-ready integrations: Ramp is expanding integrations with Microsoft products such as Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and Microsoft Entra, backed by Azure’s security, performance, and reliability.
Looking ahead, Ramp plans to explore more Azure-based use cases, especially around specialized AI models and agents, as it broadens its platform across expense, travel, and procurement. The Azure partnership underpins Ramp’s goal of being a dependable solution for finance teams while continuing to scale into new markets and larger enterprises.