Cardholders may find other articles in the Reimbursements section to be more applicable.
Overview
Ramp aims to help you handle all company expenses in a single place. This includes paying employees back for mileage or out-of-pocket expenses via our Reimbursement product!
With Reimbursements, both domestic and foreign employees can submit requests for reimbursement, managers can review and approve these expenses, and Ramp will automatically facilitate payment to the employee within 3 business days. It's the fastest reimbursement product on the market.
Jump to:
- Setting up reimbursements
- Submitting reimbursements
- Payment flow and timing
- Accounting flow
- Frequently Asked Questions
Setting up reimbursements
For a detailed setup guide, check out this article!
The basics are:
Set your preferred payment method
Ramp enables and recommends paying employees directly to their bank account (via ACH if they're in the US and via wire to more than 50 foreign countries!).
Choose a company bank account to make payments from, have employees follow a simple process to connect their bank account, and begin making payments in no time. For multi-entity customers, please note that every Ramp entity needs to have a bank account set up for direct payments to work.
If you prefer to handle payments outside of Ramp, toggle on "Allow payments outside of Ramp," and you can handle payments off-platform using any method you like.
Set up your mileage policy
Choose whether or not you will allow mileage reimbursements and how much to pay per mile. Ramp's Google Maps mileage feature populates the mileage after employees enter a start and end location. This will then automatically compute how much to reimburse employees based on the route with the fewest number of miles. Mileage rates default to the IRS Standard Mileage Rate for business purposes for that calendar year.
You can also enable International mileage reimbursements for the following countries on both the web and mobile iOS experience: Canada, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and France. Ramp automatically reimburses international employees at their respective country's mileage reimbursement rate!
Note: You may manually adjust your mileage rate at any time by going to your Reimbursements tab > Settings (upper right-hand corner) > Mileage. Also, if you disable mileage reimbursements, past mileage reimbursements cannot be edited.
Set up your submission policy
Confirm what information will be required when an employee submits a reimbursement, including receipts, memos, and any important accounting categories. More information on that here: Submission Policies
Set up your approval policy
Set up a custom approval workflow to ensure that all submitted reimbursements are reviewed and approved before paying. More information here: Approval policies
How do employees submit reimbursements?
Submitting reimbursements through Ramp is easy. With just a few clicks, employees can create a reimbursement draft, fill it out with the relevant details, and get it sent off for approval.
Check out this article, Submitting reimbursements, for more information on:
- Editing reimbursement amounts
- Bulk approving reimbursements
- Foreign transaction reimbursements
- International reimbursements
- Reimbursement payment options
Payment flow and timing
By default, Reimbursements and payments are 1-1. For each reimbursement, one debit will be made to your business bank account, and one credit will be made to the employee's bank account. That said, payments can also be batched daily by employee if preferred. You can enable or disable this feature in the Reimbursements Settings page!
Batch reimbursements
With batch payments enabled, we will send a single payment daily to an employee's bank account for all the reimbursements approved in the last 24-hour period and withdraw one amount per employee from your connected bank account. This means that if an employee submits ten reimbursements for $4 each, instead of sending your employee receiving ten separate payments for $4 as we would normally expect, we'll send a single batch payment to their bank account for $40 instead. When we debit the business, we will debit once for $40 as well in this case.
Reimbursements will show in your bank statement using the following format:
"RAMP REIMBURSE," followed by the first initial and last name of the employee being reimbursed.
To see which reimbursements were included in an ACH batch, you can click the relevant reimbursement in Ramp, click "Batched with other reimbursements", and get taken to a filtered view of all reimbursements included with that payment.
Please note: international reimbursements can not be batched at this time.
Accounting flow
Accounting for reimbursements is lightning fast like our Ramp card transactions. Currently, we use Bills to sync reimbursements to your Accounting Provider. If you've configured direct payments, we'll also sync a Bill Payment for you.
Check out this article for a more detailed breakdown: Syncing reimbursement to accounting
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
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Can I submit reimbursements for someone else?
Yes! Any owner, admin, or bookkeeper will be able to submit reimbursements for another user with the following instructions by navigating to Expenses > Reimbursements tab and clicking New Reimbursement. In the Who's it for? section, select the user who should receive the reimbursement. Submit, and you're all set.
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Can I set up different policy requirements for mileage reimbursements?
Yes! If you do not want to require your employees to upload a receipt for mileage for example, you can update your submission policy for mileage reimbursements. You'll be able to update your submission policy for both mileage and regular reimbursements.
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How is mileage distance calculated?
We automatically calculate the distance between the start and end locations for a mileage reimbursement. The route we derive for that travel is based on the current road conditions (which accounts for traffic patterns and road closures) but this can also be manually overriden if needed.