Enable early automatic payments for your card statements

Note: This article primarily applies to Ramp Administrators. Cardholders may find other articles in the Payments, limits, and statements section to be more applicable.

Set up early automatic payments to ensure you will always have an available balance for your expenses. Ramp will automatically debit your linked account when your balance, cleared and pending, hits a percentage of your total business limit. This is assessed whenever you make a transaction that changes your total cleared and pending balance.

Note: If you enable this featureafteryour balance is at the set threshold or higher (e.g., 80% or higher), the payment will trigger after your next transaction.

How to set up

Company settings > Statements & payments > Set up (under " Early autopay ")

Step 1: Determine what percentage of your business limit you want to trigger an automatic payment. Ramp offers four percentages:

Step 2: Determine your payment preference. Ramp offers two payment preferences:

Excluding pending balance
Including pending balance

Setting up early autopay threshold and payment preference in Ramp

Payment preference

Ramp has two payment preferences, allowing you to determine the payment preference best for your business operations.

Excluding pending balance:

Ramp will automatically debit only the cleared balance:

Benefits:

Statement payments always reconcile to statement amount because early auto-payments only debit cleared transactions, and statements similarly only include cleared transactions
Card balance will never be negative

Drawbacks:

Maximum number of pending payments, four per business entity, could be reached and prevent additional payments

This payment preference may be best if your business has a high volume/dollar amount of:

pending transactions that ultimately are reversed (e.g. hotel holds) or
returns of goods and services

If you select this payment method, Ramp suggests setting the trigger at 80% to ensure you have a large number of cleared transactions to prevent you from reaching the maximum number of payments.

Including pending balance:

Ramp will automatically debit the cleared and pending balance, reducing your balance to $0.00:

Benefits:

Card balance is reduced to $0.00, completely freeing up your available balance

Drawbacks:

Statement payments may not reconcile to statement amount, as statements only include cleared transactions, and payment could be made for a transaction that is ultimately reversed
Card balance could be negative, as a pending transaction could later be reversed (e.g., return, hotel hold)

This payment preference may be best if your business:

does not have many reversed transactions or returns
has a lower business limit but a high spend, allowing you to free up your card balance completely

If you select this payment method, you may be unable to reconcile your statement payments to your statement, as pending transactions can change.

Use cases and examples

Example 1 (single entity, excluding pending balance)

Early autopay setup:

Business limit: $50,000
Early autopay trigger: 80% (triggers at $40,000 in cleared + pending balance)
Early autopay payment: excluding pending balance

The business currently has $35,000 in cleared transaction and $4,000 in pending transactions

Total cleared ($35,000) + pending ($4,000) is $39,000, which does NOT trigger early autopay threshold

$2,000 of the $4,000 pending transactions move from pending > cleared

Total cleared ($37,000) + pending ($2,000) transaction is still just $39,000. Early autopay is still not triggered

Business makes a transaction of $3,000, which adds to their balance as a pending transactions

Total cleared ($37,000) + pending ($5,000) transaction is now $42,000

Early autopay threshold for the business is triggered, Ramp automatically debits $37,000 (cleared transactions only) from the linked bank account

Your card balance is $5,000, which is the total pending transactions

Example 2 (single entity, including pending balance)

Early autopay setup:

Business limit: $50,000
Early autopay trigger: 80% (triggers at $40,000 in cleared + pending balance)
Early autopay payment preference: including pending balance

The business currently has $35,000 in cleared transaction and $4,000 in pending transactions

Total cleared ($35,000) + pending ($4,000) is $39,000, which does NOT trigger early autopay threshold

$2,000 of the $4,000 pending transactions move from pending > cleared

Total cleared ($37,000) + pending ($2,000) transaction is still just $39,000. Early autopay is still not triggered

Business makes a transaction of $3,000, which adds to their balance as a pending transaction

Total cleared ($37,000) + pending ($5,000) transaction is now $42,000

Early autopay threshold for the business is triggered, Ramp automatically debits $42,000 (cleared and pending transactions) from the linked bank account

Your card balance is $0.00

Example 3 (multi-entity, excluding pending balance)

Early autopay setup:

Business limit: $100,000
Early autopay trigger: 50% (triggers at $50,000 in cleared + pending balance across all entities)
Early autopay payment preference: excluding pending balance

The business has 3 entities with the following in cleared and pending:

Entity A has $15,000 in cleared transactions and $5,000 in pending transactions ($20,000 total)
Entity B has $10,000 in cleared transactions and $10,000 in pending transactions ($20,000 total)
Entity C has $8,000 in cleared transactions ($8,000 total)
The total cleared and pending transactions across all 3 entities in $48,000, which does not yet trigger the early-auto pay threshold

Entity C then makes a $5,000 transaction, which adds to its balance as a pending transaction

Total cleared + pending transactions across the entire business at $53,000

Early autopay threshold for the business is triggered. Ramp automatically debits only the cleared amount from each entity's linked bank account:

Entity A: debit $15,000
Entity B: debit $10,000
Entity C: debit $8,000

The total balance for the business is now only the pending transactions:

Entity A: $5,000
Entity B: $10,000
Entity C: $2,000
Total: $17,000

Example 4 (multi-entity, including pending balance)

Early autopay setup:

Business limit: $100,000
Early autopay trigger: 50% (triggers at $50,000 in cleared + pending balance across all entities)
Early autopay payment preference: excluding pending balance

The business has 3 entities with the following in cleared and pending:

Entity A has $15,000 in cleared transactions and $5,000 in pending transactions ($20,000 total)
Entity B has $10,000 in cleared transactions and $10,000 in pending transactions ($20,000 total)
Entity C has $8,000 in cleared transactions ($8,000 total)
The total cleared and pending transactions across all 3 entities in $48,000, which does not yet trigger the early-auto pay threshold

Entity C then makes a $5,000 transaction, which adds to its balance as a pending transaction

Total cleared + pending transactions across the entire business at $53,000

Early autopay threshold for the business is triggered. Ramp automatically debits only the cleared amount from each entity's linked bank account:

Entity A: debit $20,000
Entity B: debit $20,000
Entity C: debit $13,000

The total balance for the business is now $0.00