Get started with Procurement

Overview

Get early spend visibility and speed up your procurement process. Ramp Procurement lets you capture every purchase request in one place, automatically loop in the right approvers, and manage purchase orders in one complete platform. Learn how to create a Procurement Spend Program and review Procurement requests below.

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Creating a procurement program

To set up a procurement workflow for your company, navigate to Spend Programs and click on "New Spend Program" and choose "Procurement".

*Note:*Only admins can set this up.

Build your intake form

Next, you can add questions to customize your procurement intake form. There are 2 default questions that will always appear at the top, but you can specify a variety of question types (e.g., you can add "File upload" question type asking employees to include a SOW with their request).

*Note:*For the vendor question, requesters have the option to select an existing vendor within Ramp or a new vendor. If they select a new vendor, request will be clearly denoted with a "new" badge next to the vendor name. When the request is approved, the new vendor will be created within Ramp and added to the Vendors tab.

Conditionally ask questions to streamline the intake process

You can also add conditional questions by toggling on "Ask this question if..." dropdown on a question. Choose a preceding question (type: Boolean, Single Select, Multi Select) and set the logic to conditionally ask questions to your employees.

Map form responses to purchase order fields

You can also toggle "Mapped to Ramp field" or drop-in a PO field question type to collect in your request form. You can map to the following fields on the purchase order.

• Bill to address - billing address
• Net payment terms - number in days
• Vendor address - vendor's address
• Vendor contact - first name, last name, phone, email
• Promise date - date
• Shipping contact - first name, last name, phone, email
• Shipping address - shipping address
• Memo - memo on the purchase order
• Attachments - file upload that appends pdf, png, jpg to end of the purchase order

After request submission, you can manually edit these fields on the purchase order.

Allow employees to submit line item coding

For inventory companies, employees often submit purchase requests for specific inventory items in their accounting system. You can turn this toggle on to allow employees to add GL categories for line items. You can choose which accounting fields you want to display on the request form. Even after a PO is submitted/approved, the requester and admins can update these fields.

Admins can enable line item coding on procurement Spend Programs so that employees can add line item coding when submitting a request. Admins also have the option to make line item coding required.

Customizing approval policy

• For approvals, Ramp will automatically default to the global Spend Request Approval Policy configured within Company Settings, but you also have the option to set a custom approval policy for the specific procurement program.
  • Note: the custom approval policy will only apply to the Spend Program it was created within (e.g. the Procurement - Software custom approval policy in the screenshot below would not be available to select when creating another Spend Program)
• You can use your intake questions to conditionally route approvals (e.g. If the vendor has access to sensitive business information, loop in IT & Security). You can also trigger contract reviews with CLM providers like Ironclad and trigger vendor onboarding.
• Customers can also add conditions to approvals for Spend Programs based on line item coding for accounting fields. To do this - edit a Spend Program's approvals workflow, and then you will see all the line item fields you have enabled appear in the conditions dropdown. Please note: In order to do this, the line item coding must be enabled.
• Admins can skip approvals and issue an approval for a PO, as long as they aren't on the approval chain.

Allow change orders

Before a request is approved, it can be edited by: Request owner, approvers, Accounts Payable and Admin roles. After approval, employees can submit change orders for requests they submit. You can set up a separate approval policy for change orders. Read more here.

Customize visibility

You can configure additional controls such as specifying which employees are able to request spend from this program (e.g. only allow employees from the Engineering department to request from this program.

Customize payment method

Last step is to customize the payment method for your procurement program. By default, purchase requests will issue Purchase Orders on Ramp but you can set it to a Virtual Card. You can also customize if the payment method can be updated by approvers and admins upon the request.

Unsure of when to use a PO vs. Virtual card?

• A Purchase Order requires invoices to be uploaded, and invoices go through a whole other set of approvals through Bill Pay (this is typically good for larger purchases or any spend you want to have centralized or reviewed by your AP/Finance team)
• A Virtual Card is good for spend where you don't necessarily want to go through an approval - once approved, the requester will receive a card for the approved amount (this is typically good for smaller dollar amounts and/or when you really trust the requester)
  • The card will automatically be restricted to the vendor requested in the purchase request
  • If an end date was specified in the request, that will be the lock date on the card
  • When the card is used, it will trigger the requester's credit card transaction approval flow

Publish

Once all the relevant details have been inputted into the Spend Program, you can click “Publish” to make the Spend Program live and available for the applicable employees to request from.

Reviewing procurement requests

Requests and PO tables

Once you create your first Procurement program, you'll see a new Procurement tab in the main navigation. In this tab, you can:

• View all requests, your drafts, requests that need your approval, and pending requests
  • You can also see the request duration to see how long the request is taking
• View all open, partially billed, fully billed, and closed purchase orders

You can also sync your purchase orders into your accounting system from the Purchase Orders tab.

Vendor insights

When reviewing requests, you'll see Vendor insights that show:

• An Overview: 365 day spend, YTD spend, and any active contracts associated with the vendor
• Seat Intelligence: Active seats, total seats, and utilization of a vendor's product
• Price Intelligence: How your spend on this vendor compares to similar businesses

Customizing purchase orders

Ramp Procurement allows you to customize purchase orders for your business needs. To do so, navigate to Procurement > Purchase orders > Settings. You can also set different configurations per entity on Ramp.

• PO Numbering - Customize the prefix for your POs
• Logo - Upload a logo for your PO PDF
• Billing address - Set a default billing address
• Billing contact - Set a default billing contact (e.g. invoices@domain))
• Footer text - Customize instructions for every PO

Note: Custom branding applies to the PDF download only, not to emailed POs.

• Emailed POs do not include custom branding (logo, footer, terms and conditions) or use the custom template. Only the downloaded PDF reflects these settings.
• To send a branded PO to your vendor, download the PDF from the PO and email it manually.