Build a Client-Expense Worksheet Before Picking Ramp or Procurify

Start the worksheet with a simple list: travel and client meetings, research and data subscriptions, subcontracted specialist fees, office and internal software, and anything else that shows up on a monthly statement. Most strategy firms find travel is the largest and most variable category, since a live client engagement can mean weekly flights while a quiet month means almost none. Research subscriptions tend to be the opposite: small, fixed, and easy to forget you're still paying for once a project that needed them ends. Write down roughly how often each category recurs, weekly, monthly, or per-engagement, since that cadence matters more than the dollar amount when you're deciding how tightly to control it.

Travel and client meeting costs are usually billable and expected on the invoice; research subscriptions and subcontracted specialists are sometimes billable and sometimes absorbed by the firm, depending on how the engagement is scoped. Business and consumer services firms typically collect from clients in around 67.3 days¹, so any cost marked billable that isn't tagged to the engagement immediately is cash the firm is fronting for over two months before it comes back. Mark each row on your worksheet billable, absorbed, or mixed, and for anything mixed, decide now which portion is billable so a consultant isn't guessing mid-trip. A firm that skips this step tends to discover the answer the hard way, when a client's finance team questions a line item and nobody on the engagement remembers whether it was ever meant to be passed through in the first place.

Travel usually needs fast approval, a consultant booking a flight the week before an engagement starts can't wait days for a purchase order to clear. Subcontracted specialist fees usually deserve a slower, more deliberate approval, since they're larger and less time-sensitive. This is where Ramp and Procurify split naturally along your worksheet: Ramp's card-based model fits the fast-approval categories like travel, while Procurify's requisition model fits the slower, higher-dollar categories like subcontractor engagements and multi-year research subscriptions. Write the approver's name or role next to each row too, not just the speed, since a worksheet that says how fast without saying who ends up defaulting to whoever happens to be available, which is exactly how approval discipline quietly erodes over a busy quarter.

Firms in this category typically pay their own vendors in around 24.4 days², noticeably faster than the 67.3 days it usually takes to collect from a client. That gap means every billable expense category on your worksheet is effectively financed by the firm until the client pays, which is a strong argument for tagging travel and client costs to the engagement the moment they're booked, not weeks later when someone reconstructs a trip from receipts.

Clients push back on expense line items more often than they push back on the consulting fee itself, and the usual cause is a charge that shows up on the invoice with no context attached: a client meeting cost with no note about which meeting, a database charge with no note about which deliverable it supported. Add a fifth column to your worksheet for exactly this: a one-line justification captured at the moment of purchase, not reconstructed weeks later when a client's finance team asks what a line item was for. Whichever tool you choose, make that justification a required field rather than an optional one, since the purchases most likely to draw a client's attention are exactly the ones someone was too rushed to explain properly the first time.

Once the worksheet is filled in, the choice usually becomes obvious: a firm where travel dominates and subcontracting is rare leans toward Ramp's fast card-based approvals. A firm running frequent subcontracted specialist engagements or multi-year research contracts leans toward Procurify's requisition discipline. Most mid-size firms end up using both, cards for travel, purchase orders for subcontractors and subscriptions, exactly as the worksheet's five columns suggest. See Procurify vs Coupa vs Ramp for a third option worth a look.

Fill in these worksheet columns before you compare tools:

1. List every recurring expense category and note how often each one recurs: weekly, monthly or per engagement.
2. Mark which expenses are billable to a client and which the firm absorbs.
3. Decide who approves each category and how fast, since travel needs quick approval and specialist fees deserve a slower look.
4. Note the payment terms you face from vendors and the time clients take to pay you.
5. Add a one-line justification for each expense that could draw a client billing dispute.