Is AI spend shredding your budget? Now, you can see (and control) where it's going with AI Spend Console.

Every company is adopting AI, but they lack the infrastructure to get a clear view of their AI spend and connect it back to business outcomes. By integrating usage data from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor with employee data in Rippling, CFOs and CTOs can see exactly which teams, departments, and roles are driving costs. Rippling can also map AI spend to metrics like performance ratings and pull request volume, so they can analyze the ROI of all those tokens they're spending.

We built AI Spend Console to answer questions like:

• Which models are used most frequently, and by which teams?
• Which roles and levels are driving up our AI bill?
• How does AI spend per pull request differ between our top and bottom performers?
• Which engineers have high AI spend, whose peers frequently ask them to redo work in code reviews?

Get started for free. No Rippling subscription required → https://www.rippling.com/platform/ai/ai-spend-console

Today, we’re launching Rippling Procurement, an AI procurement platform that allows businesses to buy everything they need, from software to professional services, up to 5x faster while maximizing savings and minimizing risk on every purchase.

Paired with Rippling AI, a team of AI agents can now help do the manual work most teams don't have time for: reviewing contracts for red flags, checking new vendors for security risk, matching invoices to POs, and flagging renewals 30/60/90 days before businesses are charged.

Together, they help automate up to 90% of the manual admin work in procurement.

Because procurement already lives in Rippling alongside your HR, IT, and finance data, no purchase stands alone. Every dollar is connected to the person, department, cost center, contract, approval, and system access behind it.

This helps you and your teams make better buying decisions with complete context of your business.

Learn more: https://rippling.com/products/finance/procurement

Annual performance reviews are where good intentions go to die. Once a year, fuzzy criteria, calibration nobody sees, and a rating the employee does not trust anyway. A few things that help:

• Collect feedback all year, not in a year-end scramble. Even a two-line note after a project beats reconstructing January from memory in December.
• Write down what each rating actually means, then calibrate across managers. A "meets expectations" on one team should not be a "3" on another.
• Let AI summarize and draft, not decide. Great for turning a year of notes into a first pass; it should never assign the number.
• Keep it short and frequent. A 20-minute quarterly check-in gets done. A two-hour annual form gets dreaded and rushed.

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A few questions that come up a lot:

How often should we actually run reviews?

Most teams land on a lighter check-in every quarter or two, and save the heavier written review for once a year. Done right, nothing in the annual one is a surprise.

Are self-reviews worth it?

If they hand the manager real examples to work from, yes. If they are a formality nobody reads, cut them. Keep them short and specific either way.

How do you stop everyone drifting to a 4 out of 5?

Calibration. Get managers comparing ratings against the same written definitions before anything is final, not after.

What about fully remote or distributed teams?

The continuous-feedback part matters more, not less. When you cannot read the room in person, the notes throughout the year are the record.

Rippling runs reviews, continuous feedback, and calibration on the same record as the rest of HR, with AI that summarizes feedback so a review covers the whole year, not just the last month.

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Book a demo if you want to see Rippling in action for yourself! 

What part of performance reviews causes you the most headache? Feel free to share your experience in the comments section!

When you’re a fast-growing team, it’s hard to balance hiring with offers and new-hire setup. As Rippling customers like Forterra can tell you, Rippling can help you handle this dilemma by providing recruiting and HR in one integrated system. Forterra is a US-based driverless vehicles systems company that consolidated its recruiting, HR, and performance systems onto Rippling. Here are some of the lessons fast-growing teams can learn from their story.

Q: What’s so hard about running recruiting in a separate tool from HR?

The handoff from a signed offer to onboarding. When the applicant tracking system doesn't pass candidate and offer details into onboarding, someone re-keys them by hand, and details slip: offer letters that don't carry over cleanly, new hires who aren't fully set up on day one. The more you hire, the more those mistakes pile up.

Q: What's the fix?

Connect recruiting to your HRIS so a signed offer automatically triggers the onboarding workflow instead of a manual re-key. The candidate's information becomes the employee record, and accounts, paperwork, and day-one setup kick off from the same action.

Q: Why does keeping recruiting, HR, and performance data in one place matter beyond onboarding?

Reporting and planning. When hiring data lives with your headcount and performance data, you can see how recruiting is tracking against the plan and pull headcount reports in minutes instead of reconciling exports from separate tools.

Q: When is a separate, specialized recruiting tool still the right call?

If you have deep, specialized recruiting requirements a broader platform can't meet, or a dedicated recruiting-ops function that owns the integrations. For a lean team scaling fast, the cost usually shows up in the handoffs between systems rather than in missing recruiting features.

Q: What's the practical first step?

Fix the offer-to-onboarding seam first. Map where a new person's information gets entered by hand more than once between "offer accepted" and "day one," and close that gap before anything else.

A real example:

Forterra, a US driverless-vehicle systems company, grew headcount quickly after a major funding round while running recruiting and performance in separate tools on top of its core HR. Offer letters were slipping between the recruiting tool and onboarding, and the siloed systems slowed everyone down. After consolidating recruiting, HR, and performance onto Rippling (where it already ran payroll, time, and benefits), a signed offer now triggers onboarding automatically for day-one setup, the team credits a major jump in hiring and onboarding efficiency, and headcount reports that used to take manual work run in minutes, which lets a small back office support a fast-growing company.

Where Rippling fits:

Rippling runs recruiting, HR, payroll, and performance on one employee record, so a signed offer flows straight into onboarding and your hiring data feeds headcount planning without re-keying across tools.

Happy to answer other questions about scaling hiring in the comments! For the full story, read the Forterra customer case study.

Hey r/rippling, we just launched First Principles, a new podcast from Rippling for early-stage founders and people thinking about starting a company.

The idea is pretty simple: there’s a lot of noise right now around AI, fundraising, GTM, defensibility, and what it actually takes to build a durable company. First Principles is meant to help founders break down those assumptions and pressure-test what advice still holds up.
Our first episode is with Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction, hosted by Rippling CPO Matt MacInnis.

A few takeaways from the conversation:

There is only one “A-team.” When founders worry that Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic could build what they’re building, Sarah’s point is that resources are not the same as priority. If your product is the 27th most important thing to an incumbent, you may not be competing with their best people or their deepest urgency.

The best founders own the problem. Sarah said one thing she looks for is whether a founder has thought deeply about the problem and feels like they own it. That applies to product, but also to GTM. “We’ll figure out distribution later” usually does not cut it.

Fundraising is a sales process. Sarah’s advice was to think about investors like enterprise buyers. There are multiple stakeholders, internal incentives, timing questions, and steps in the pipeline. The more founders understand that process, the more control they have over it.

You can watch/listen to the full episode on:

• Youtube: LINK
• Spotify: LINK
• Apple: LINK

Would love to hear what topics or guests people think we should cover next!

Hey r/rippling - we just launched First Principles, a new podcast from Rippling for early-stage founders and people thinking about starting a company.

The idea is pretty simple: there’s a lot of noise right now around AI, fundraising, GTM, defensibility, and what it actually takes to build a durable company. First Principles is meant to help founders break down those assumptions and pressure-test what advice still holds up.
Our first episode is with Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction, hosted by Rippling CPO Matt MacInnis.

A few takeaways from the conversation:

• There is only one “A-team.” When founders worry that Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic could build what they’re building, Sarah’s point is that resources are not the same as priority. If your product is the 27th most important thing to an incumbent, you may not be competing with their best people or their deepest urgency.
• The best founders own the problem. Sarah said one thing she looks for is whether a founder has thought deeply about the problem and feels like they own it. That applies to product, but also to GTM. “We’ll figure out distribution later” usually does not cut it.
• Fundraising is a sales process. Sarah’s advice was to think about investors like enterprise buyers. There are multiple stakeholders, internal incentives, timing questions, and steps in the pipeline. The more founders understand that process, the more control they have over it.

You can watch/listen to the full episode on:

• Youtube: LINK
• Spotify: LINK
• Apple: LINK

Would love to hear what topics or guests people think we should cover next!

Open enrollment is the one HR project where a small process slip turns into hundreds of tickets in January. Here are the questions HR professionals ask us most, with straight answers. None of this is legal or tax advice; where it touches federal rules we point to the IRS so you can confirm the current-year specifics. 

Q: When should we start?

Most teams that run a calm enrollment start 6 to 8 weeks before the new plan year. Lock plan designs and rates first, then build the communication timeline backward from your enrollment close date. 

Q: What actually trips people up?

Data hygiene. Stale dependents, wrong salaries feeding life and disability calculations, and employees who never confirm an election. Decide up front whether enrollment is active (everyone must re-elect) or passive (current elections roll over) and say which in every message. 

Q: Can employees change elections mid-year?

Generally no. Pre-tax benefit elections under a Section 125 cafeteria plan are fixed for the plan year unless the employee has a qualifying life event (a permitted change in status such as marriage, birth, or loss of other coverage). The IRS defines what qualifies and the window to make the change, so confirm against current IRS guidance on Section 125 plans and your plan documents. 

Q: What are our ACA reporting obligations?

If you are an Applicable Large Employer (generally 50 or more full-time and full-time-equivalent employees in the prior year), you file Forms 1094-C and 1095-C with the IRS and provide a 1095-C statement to employees. The recurring pattern: furnish to employees by January 31 with an automatic 30-day extension, file electronically by March 31, and note that anyone with 10 or more total information returns must file electronically. There is also an option to skip automatic mailing and instead post a clear, conspicuous website notice telling employees they can request their 1095-C, with the required contact details. Exact dates shift year to year, so confirm on the IRS instructions for Forms 1094-C and 1095-C and the IRS page on reporting by applicable large employers before each cycle. 

Q: How do we get people to actually enroll?

Multi-channel and plain language. One source of truth for plan details, a short benefits summary, reminders at the open, the midpoint, and 48 hours before close, and a single deadline that does not move. Manager nudges beat another company-wide email. 

Where Rippling fits:

Rippling runs benefits enrollment and ACA reporting (including 1095-C generation) on the same system as payroll and HR, so elections, payroll deductions, and year-end forms draw from one employee record. 

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments!

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^(This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide tax, accounting, or legal advice.)

Hey all,

Scheduling shouldn’t feel like guesswork - but for teams running on shifts, it often does. Whether you’re juggling hourly staff, rotating night crews, or project-based work, having the right structure in place can make a huge difference in coverage, clarity, and burnout prevention.

To make things easier, I’ve put together a collection of plug-and-play shift scheduling templates you can copy and customize. From daily and weekly planners to niche setups like on-call, restaurant, and night shift schedules, these are designed to help you spend less time formatting spreadsheets and more time actually managing your team.

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Shift work schedule template

Hourly work schedule template

Daily work schedule template

Weekly work schedule template

Shift work schedule template

Hourly work schedule template

Daily work schedule template

Weekly work schedule template

Night shift work schedule template

Monthly shift work schedule template

Restaurant shift work schedule template

Work-from-home schedule template

On-call work schedule template

Project-based work schedule template

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For more tips and examples, check out our resources available in Rippling University.

Hey everyone, wanted to share a practical roadmap for implementing AI in your finance function. If you’re looking to bring AI tools into your finance processes but aren’t sure where to start, this 30-day plan lays out an actionable approach that focuses on prioritizing opportunities, preparing your data, piloting tools, and setting clear goals.

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Week 1: Map out and prioritize opportunities

• Build a fact base around the pain points today and what processes and teams would benefit most from deploying AI tools
• For key opportunity areas, estimate what is the value at stake and how difficult it would be to implement
• Use this information to build initial view of prioritization
• Get input from technology and process subject matter experts to refine plan

Week 2: Establish high-quality data sources for AI usage

• Establish Authoritative Data Sources (e.g. ERP, FP&A software, Data Warehouse) where data is:
  • Validated and reconciled to Systems of Record
  • Updated in timely, automated process so is available
  • Structured in a way that is easy to consume for AI tools

Week 3: Identify and evaluate potential tools

• Map out the timing and availability of AI capabilities across our different platforms, including:
  •  Tools we already have licenses for today
  • New tools we should considering purchasing
• Create initial plan on what features to pilot / consider for each area

Week 4: Set success criteria and KPIs

• Define success criteria for what we want to accomplish by quarter
• Define KPIs for how to measure success

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We'd love to know how you approach AI implementation in your systems. How do you do it? What would you change?

For more tips and examples, check out our resources available in Rippling University.