How Pearl Health Turned Burdensome Procurement Work into a Strategic Advantage

About Pearl Health

Pearl Health is a rapidly growing healthtech company that partners with hospitals, health systems, and primary care groups to help them deliver better, more proactive patient care.. Founded in 2020, Pearl has expanded to work with thousands of providers across 40+ states and raised more than $100M in funding from top-tier investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Viking Global Investors, AlleyCorp, and Ulysses Management.

Justin Chee is the Vice President and Controller at Pearl Health, responsible for keeping the company disciplined in cash management while remaining flexible for the company’s continued innovation and growth, particularly as the company invests in new product features and AI capabilities. 

The Challenge

Disjointed procurement hinders growth and efficiency

Pearl Health faced the classic scaling challenge of balancing ambitious expansion with disciplined cash flow management. Their fragmented vendor management processes caused operational and resource bottlenecks, ultimately preventing real work from getting done. Justin wanted tighter controls so he could maintain complete visibility into spend. 

"Our procurement was completely fragmented; managing vendors in various spreadsheets, contracts in shared drives, and approvals through inconsistent email threads or Slack messages," he explained. "I'd spend hours weekly tracking down contract details. Renewal dates lived in personal spreadsheets rather than a centralized system, so they'd sneak up on us."

The disjointed approach resulted in:

• Longer purchase cycles with an inconsistent approval workflow 
• Difficulty tracking spend with visibility into existing and renewing contracts 
• Time lost in manual renewal tracking due to lack of proactive or systematic alerts

"Everything was reactive and unsustainable for a company balancing prudent financial management with ambitious growth,” Justin added. “It's much harder to fix later. Tropic allows you to scale your financial operations with the growth of your business."

The Solution

Procurement that takes less time 

Pearl Health selected Tropic to transform their procurement operations, integrating seamlessly with their existing Ramp spend management setup to create a robust intake-to-pay workflow that uses the best of both platforms.

Justin explained that everything pre-purchase flows through Tropic, capturing all the necessary information for requests, auto-routing approvals, managing negotiations, and storing contract details. Then in Ramp, the team can manage payments and other post-purchase needs. 

“Tropic’s customizable workflows allow us to get granular in building out a robust procurement process. I don’t believe other spend management tools are built out the same way,” he noted. “The Tropic/Ramp combination gives us end-to-end visibility from contract initiation through payment.”

Eliminate manual invoice matching with AI Invoice Match

Once contracts are signed and invoices are sent, Tropic will automatically compare invoices in Ramp with the original contracted amount. Tropic AI Invoice Match flags with any discrepancies to Pearl Health’s finance team to review and act accordingly. 

"The platform integrated well with our existing Ramp setup,” Justin noted. “Automating that matching process saves our team time and reduces overpayment risk, which is critical for managing cash flow while investing in growth initiatives.”

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The Outcome

Faster procurement with guided expertise or hands-on support

When team members negotiate on their own, they start from a stronger position by using Tropic’s price benchmark data and negotiation playbooks. And for larger negotiations, Tropic’s expert services team manages the negotiation end-to-end for Pearl Health.

“Tropic's team has supported negotiating preferred vendor rates for us, and has saved our team valuable time, both from handling negotiations on our behalf as well as from reducing the time it takes our team to handle procurement requests,” Justin added. 

Earlier renewal prep leads to more favorable deal terms

What was once a manual, reactive renewal process is now a proactive engine that gives them the runway to get the outcome they want. With a streamlined process and visibility into contracts, the team starts preparing nearly 90 days ahead of renewal, which results in better purchases.

“This allows us to land on the best outcome for our team, versus being reactive to an upcoming renewal and being forced to potentially renew at less preferential terms given time constraints,” Justin explained. 

More time for strategic planning, built for 2-3x growth

Less time on administrative procurement work gives Justin more room to scale financial operations and move the business forward. He noted that Tropic gives him a scalable procurement process that can withstand 2-3x growth without significant changes.

“The visibility into contracts and the procurement process has been great, not only for myself, but for the entire company,” Justin added. “I can pull up any contract in seconds, we have automated renewal reminders, and I’m able to point team members to contracts and terms seamlessly... Having Tropic's procurement team as an extension of our capabilities has been very helpful.”