How a NYC Venture Studio Automated Their Multi-Entity Expense Management
The Challenge
JX, a New York-based venture studio that creates and manages companies from scratch, faced a common challenge in expense management across their organization structure:
- Management Company: Handles central operations and pays all expenses
- Fund Entities: Various investment funds
- Portfolio Companies: 16+ companies they've created and manage
"We pay everything out of the management company for ease. Right? Like, that's where the credit card is linked up. So we're not gonna have 30 different credit cards for every fund," explains S, Head of Finance at JX.
The problem? When an expense needed to be charged back to a fund or portfolio company, the finance team had to manually create invoices and manage inter-company clearing accounts in Quickbooks.
The Solution
Working with Connects Digital, JX implemented an automated workflow that:
- Captures expenses from Ramp
- Creates appropriate invoices in Quickbooks automatically
- Routes charges to the correct entity
The entire solution was built and tested in just two hours using Zapier, connecting their existing tech stack of Ramp and Quickbooks.
Real-World Example
Before: A portfolio company CEO's flight gets canceled at the airport. The management company quickly books a new flight through their central card. Finance then needs to:
- Record the expense in Quickbooks
- Create an inter-company clearing account entry
- Generate and send an invoice to the portfolio company
- Track the receivable
After: The expense flows automatically from Ramp to Quickbooks, and an invoice is generated and sent to the portfolio company without manual intervention.
