Ramp or Brex for a Multi-Clinic MedSpa Group

Injectable product, neurotoxin and filler in particular, has a direct, traceable link to a specific treatment and provider, which makes it the input every accurate provider compensation model depends on. When it's coded together with general clinic supplies or retail product, you lose the ability to calculate true product cost per treatment, and a provider whose bonus depends on that number has every reason to question a total they can't verify.

Retail product sold at the front desk carries a markup structure closer to a retail business than a clinical one, and mixing its purchase cost into the same bucket as clinical supplies makes both numbers less useful. A clinic's retail margin and its clinical supply cost per treatment are two different management questions, and blending the purchase-side data makes it harder to answer either one well.

Ramp allows setting different category rules per card, which suits a medspa group well: one card structure for the front desk's retail restocks, a separate one for clinical staff ordering injectable inventory, each with its own vendor list and category restrictions. If your clinics already order from a consistent short list of injectable distributors, Ramp's vendor matching keeps that flow of purchases coded without manual review.

A laser, body contouring device or other capital equipment purchase runs well past routine supply spend and often needs to clear on a vendor's delivery timeline. Brex's limits scale with the group's cash position rather than a flat per-card cap, which matters more here than for routine injectable and retail restocking, where the transaction sizes are smaller and more predictable.

Before rolling out either platform, agree on exactly which cost code feeds the provider bonus formula, and lock down who can code a transaction to it. A single miscoded purchase, a retail restock accidentally tagged as clinical injectable spend, can throw off a bonus calculation enough to trigger a dispute that costs you more in provider trust than the coding error itself. Review the injectable cost code specifically each pay period, before running bonus calculations, rather than trusting the full statement is clean. Share that review with providers themselves rather than treating it as a back-office task, since a provider who can see their own injectable cost code trusts the resulting bonus number far more than one who only sees the final payout figure each month.

Lock down these points before go-live:

• Agree in writing on exactly which cost code feeds the provider bonus formula before either platform is rolled out.
• Restrict who can code a transaction to that cost code, so a retail restock cannot slip in as clinical injectable spend.
• Keep injectable inventory and retail skincare in separate cost codes, so product cost per treatment and retail margin stay two distinct numbers.
• Give each new clinic its own card or cost code before its first inventory order, so early spend isn't parked in a neighboring clinic's bucket.

If a clinical director or regional lead travels between clinics for training, provider onboarding or a device installation, Navan bundles that travel booking into the same card program as clinic spend, keeping a flight or hotel charge visible alongside the clinic's other costs for that period. This matters more for a group spread across several metro areas than for one running two clinics a short drive apart, where leadership travel is rare enough not to need a dedicated booking tool.

Opening a new location often means a rush of injectable inventory and retail stock ordered before the clinic has its own established card or cost code, so early spend gets tagged to the nearest existing clinic or a general company bucket out of convenience. That single decision then skews the new clinic's early product cost per treatment and makes its first few months of performance data misleading when leadership reviews it later.

Set up the new clinic's card and cost code before the first inventory order goes out, even if the clinic itself hasn't opened its doors yet, so the ramp-up spend is attributed correctly from day one rather than needing to be untangled after the fact. A short written checklist for opening a new location, covering card issuance and cost-code setup alongside the usual staffing and licensing steps, keeps this from depending on someone remembering to do it under the pressure of an opening deadline.