Is It Time to Put a 532-Year-Old Sacred Cow Out to Pasture?

All scientific disciplines have their foundation bricks.

The things we know are true. The immutable laws on which everything else is built:

And finance has double-entry bookkeeping.

Over 500 years old, virtually everything else in finance is built on this foundation.

So when Ramp co-founder and co-CEO Eric Glyman declared earlier this year that it was time to “close the book” on double-entry bookkeeping, my inner accountant took that personally.

Well... more precisely, it felt like he’d walked into my house on Christmas morning, looked my kids in the eyes, and told them Santa wasn’t real.

Naturally, I had to ask him about it...

And, as it so happens, the Ramp team announced their expansion to the UK on Tuesday, giving me the perfect opportunity to go behind the scenes and find out whether it was time to retire my office homage to Luca Pacioli.

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Eric told me: “Accounting still works a lot like it did in an analog world. Something happens in the business, and finance pieces together the financial record afterward. A company buys something. Then finance waits for the invoice, tracks down the receipt, figures out what it was for, resolves any discrepancies, codes the transaction, reconciles the accounts, and eventually closes the books.

Accrual accounting is like an intervention that keeps the numbers right while all of that catches up. That’s important. But it also means we’ve gotten used to a lot of avoidable friction.

In a digital world, why should there be such a gap between the business doing something and the books knowing about it?”

This point stirred something in me...

Does the beautiful symmetry of double-entry bookkeeping remove the urgency to get each transaction right at source, and lull us into complacency about the friction in between?

Eric added:

“The next generation of finance should capture that context as the business operates, so the books aren't something finance has to reconstruct weeks later.

That gap costs businesses an insane amount of time and money. Which is why I’m obsessed with eliminating it.”

It got me thinking... where, precisely, is the epicenter of all that friction?

Today, a three-day month-end close is absolutely world class.

In a complex organization, getting there can take years of transformation work, flawless systems and processes, not to mention phenomenal talent and discipline.

And even then...

Three days is still a long lag for numbers on something that’s already happened. So two things can be true at once:

Why?

Strip accounting right back and every core transaction cycle starts with an economic event. Finance’s job is turning that event into something accountable and reportable.

The further the transaction travels without carrying the right accounting and metadata with it, the more work explodes around it.

Which leads to... the Cone of Accounting Bullshit.

A single economic event can be estimated, accrued, reversed, coded, reclassified, allocated, and remapped half a dozen times before it becomes useful information.

Meanwhile, if we’d captured the accounting, timing, and metadata properly at source, we could have got it right once and left the bloody thing alone.

And one part of accounting creates vastly more of this bullshit than the others.

Spend.

Supplier invoices. Purchase orders. Corporate cards. Employee expenses. All the different ways a business commits to and incurs cost before it eventually finds its way into the books.

Spend is uniquely messy because it is radically decentralized.

It’s different from payroll or Order to Cash because anybody can initiate it. Suppliers send their own documents, in their own formats, on their own timetable. Procurement only knows part of the story. The budget owner knows another part. AP... well, they see the invoice.

So the context arrives fragmented and late, while creating endless opportunities to chase, estimate, interpret, correct, and reconcile.

That’s why spend creates such a disproportionate share of the Cone of Accounting Bullshit.

And it is also why I don’t think this problem will ever be solved inside the ERP. ERPs are brilliant systems of record. But their workflows are built around how accounting works, not how people work. They rely on employees choosing the right process, supplying the right information, and following the controls.

Ramp is interesting because it is focused on bridging that gap: making spending simple for the employee, while capturing the control, accounting, and metadata finance needs underneath.

I think we radically underestimate the downstream impact of the Cone of Accounting Bullshit.

We’re good at talking about what it means for finance teams. The late nights. The manual work. The endless reconciliations and reclasses. But don’t kid yourself into thinking this is just an inconvenience for accountants.

The path from accounting friction to real business damage isn’t always obvious.

But follow it far enough, and it usually ends up in the P&L or cash flow:

Ramp has declared war on the Cone of Accounting Bullshit, building a platform that does all of its work at the point the spend is committed.

Karim Atiyeh, Eric’s fellow co-CEO and co-Founder at Ramp said:

“The problem isn’t that finance teams lack tools. It’s that every tool owns one step and leaves finance to stitch the system together. Ramp creates one control layer across cards, expenses, procurement, bills, and accounting. We should absorb the complexity in the platform so employees can spend the right way and finance only has to handle the exceptions.”

The operating principle for companies using Ramp is brutally simple: you want to spend money? Whether it’s cards, expenses, recurring supplier invoices or one-time AP (now even including AI-token spend)... you put it through Ramp.

That’s one interface to the business for anyone who needs to spend Company money. And that same interface handles connection to the ERP and treasury systems, all coded based on the transaction level context acquired in the Ramp platform.

Contrast that with what we are used to:

The complexity gets distributed across the organization. Another victory for the Cone of Accounting Bullshit...

Ramp works on the opposite idea: the interface is organized around how work actually happens and decisions get made. This protects users from unnecessary complexity, while forcing control, data capture, and visibility before the spend is committed.

Experienced CFOs have probably heard a promise like this many times before. And it’s a nice promise... which finance team doesn’t want less friction, more control, and greater visibility?

So, how is Ramp actually different?

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the platform, both as a customer and in a sandbox. And I’ve spoken to finance teams running serious amounts of spend through it.

So here are a few examples of the Ramp magic at work:

Before the spend is committed. Ramp makes the right workflow appear around the user before they buy anything.

Start with the corporate cards. The control is enforced when the employee tries to spend, not discovered afterwards.

Physical or virtual cards can be programmed with hard limits, maximum transaction sizes, as well as merchant and category restrictions. Limits reset anywhere from daily to annually, or simply expire after a one-off purchase.

For example, you could block alcohol purchases for your entire sales team the day of the annual sales offsite meeting. I’m not saying you should... just that you COULD (serves them right for that new customer they gifted 90 day payment terms.)

Vendor specific cards are useful for managing high spend lines that need specific controls; i.e. a virtual vendor card with specific controls restricted purely to manage Meta ad spend

Spend Programs push that idea further. Whether it’s travel, meals, or marketing, Finance can build reusable workflows around how people actually spend, defining eligibility, spending limits, and the required approvals and restrictions. And, even how transactions should eventually be coded. Just set the logic once, then issue it repeatedly rather than rebuilding controls every time a new card is issued, or an employee joins, leaves, or changes jobs.

At the point of spend. Ramp makes it insanely easy for employees to provide missing context, and chases them when it needs more.

Buy lunch on a Ramp card and, before you’ve had time to stuff the receipt in your pocket, Ramp can already be asking for any missing context by WhatsApp. Receipts, memos, and accounting fields can be submitted straight from the conversation. Ramp then uses the transaction history and existing context to suggest the coding.

Here’s what that looks like for an employee immediately after buying lunch:

Meanwhile, the controls are working in the background. Hard spend rules can prevent prohibited transactions while Ramp’s Policy Agent reviews each expense against the company’s written policy. A huge amount of downstream noise simply never gets created when the evidence and context are captured while the transaction is still fresh.

After the money is spent. With so much control and accounting work done up front, there is far less cleanup left afterwards. But the bigger prize is the higher-fidelity metadata captured at transaction level. Once you have that, the reporting and forecasting possibilities get, well, endless.

And... a ton of accounting work simply evaporates.

Another interesting innovation is the Policy dashboard, which shows, among other things, how much spend the Policy Agent judged to be out of policy, but was subsequently approved by someone with the authority to override it. The platform will also suggest improvements to the policy where it sees opportunities to tighten or clarify based on employee and approver behavior.

Ramp’s rise is one of the biggest stories in CFO tech I’ve ever seen.

Today is day 2,739 for Ramp. How do I know? Eric famously counts the days since they started building, part of a culture obsessed with internal accountability and momentum.

And the numbers are pretty ridiculous.

Ramp now serves more than 70,000 businesses. It has passed $1 billion in annualized revenue, is free-cash-flow positive, and powers more than $200 billion of purchases annually. Its latest funding round valued the company at $44 billion.

Among the businesses trusting Ramp to manage their spend are Robinhood, Virgin Voyages, ElevenLabs, Stripe, CBRE, and Shopify. But it works just as well for companies in any industry, of any size (they proudly told me they serve the oldest potato farm in the US) and Ramp report that an average customer saves 5% of spend through the platform after onboarding.

I’ve probably met more than 30 people working at Ramp now, and one thing hits you immediately: the caliber of the team. It is stacked with A+ players. Goldman Sachs is probably the only organization I’ve personally come across with comparable talent density.

But the thing that really stands out at Ramp is their speed. It has a startup metabolism, and an almost anaphylactic reaction to inertia. That explains their shock and awe flurry of activity and product releases.

A few recent examples:

And the next major frontier is international expansion, which began with a launch in Canada earlier this summer.

And just yesterday Ramp announced its launch in the UK, complete with a full page apology (for being late) in the Financial Times.

Jacob Wallenberg, Ramp’s VP of International Expansion, told me: “Accounting was the obvious place to start. Over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time with UK finance teams, getting into details that sound small until you’re the person cleaning them up every month: whether VAT on a receipt can actually be reclaimed, how a mixed-VAT purchase should be split and coded in Xero, how the real supplier behind an Amazon transaction makes it into the ERP, or why someone still has to download an invoice from a vendor portal and forward it by hand.

Those conversations have shaped what we’ve built for the UK and what we’re prioritizing next. We’ll earn trust here by staying close to customers and removing the friction they actually live with, one messy workflow at a time.”

I dropped in to see the team in their fresh new London office just last week...

Ramp already has a full stack team of 15 (and soon to be 30) on the ground in London. Yes sales, but also product, engineering, finance, legal, and compliance. Eric Oancea, who is leading the UK launch, told me how the team had adapted Ramp to meet UK-specific finance requirements, and was moving at their trademark sprinting pace to roll out new features for UK customers every day. This included developing the tax agent to find hidden pockets of previously unclaimed VAT.

So... is it time to retire double-entry bookkeeping? Well, no. That would be like a physicist saying: “Yeah, I’m kinda done with gravity”... but it IS an important thought experiment.

Finance teams should be relentless about shrinking the gap between the business event and the accounting transaction, and capturing the context, control and metadata as close to source as possible.

And the biggest battleground in that fight is on the spend side of the ledger: supplier spend, employee expenses, corporate cards, etc. All the messy ways costs get committed before they eventually find their way into the books.

You will not solve this problem by trying to make conventional ERP workflows move incrementally faster.

It’s going to need something different... built around how work gets done and decisions happen.

And that’s where Ramp is certainly different.

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Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need.