Welcome!

Welcome to Ramp, the most powerful spend management platform. The resource below will tell you all you need to know to get started. 

Understanding Ramp - Financial Basics

1. Card Functionality: Ramp currently offers a charge card with a 30-day billing cycle. Your billing cycle begins on the day of your first transaction. Your balance is due in full every 30 days from then on. 
2. Available Cashback: How much cashback you can apply to your current statement (redeem by “Payments” →  Redeem Cash Back). As a reminder, you earn 1.5% cashback on every single Ramp purchase.
3. Available Spend: How much you have remaining to spend in your current billing cycle. Access additional spending by making a manual payment (“Payments” →  “Manual Payment”)
4. Next Payment: The date of your next automatic payment, your Current Statement Balance will be deducted from your default payment account on that date.
5. Account Statements: Available on the day of your “Next Payment” by clicking on the Statements button on your Transactions tab.

“My Ramp” - Your Card Dashboard

As a Ramp Admin, you have the ability to create and edit your own card(s). Basic cardholders must either be assigned a card during their invite process or request one from their manager/admin. “My Ramp” allows you to view your current cards and create/request new cards based on your user type.

• Virtual Cards: Instantly create virtual cards for recurring purchases, granular vendor management control, or one-off expenses.
• Physical Cards: Physical cards are recommended for individuals who spend frequently on T&E. They take roughly 1 week to arrive after a physical card is approved/created.

Creating New Cards

Go to My Ramp → Create Card. Choose from our commonly used card template or Create a Custom Card. Here is the required information for new cards:

1. Card Name - as shown in the dashboard, this does not change your name on the card
2. Card Type - choose virtual or physical. if you already have one physical, you cannot create another.
3. Card Amount - the limit on that card (separate from your business limit)
4. Frequency - choose how often you want the Card Amount to reset (daily, monthly, yearly, or “Total” which is basically a one time stipend)

Editing Cards

To adjust your card limit or frequency, click on any of your cards and click “Edit Card” and update the $$ amount.

Setting Your Ramp Expense Policies

Let Ramp be the bad guy when it comes to enforcing your company’s expense policy. We automatically remind cardholders to submit receipts and/or memos via text and email. Cardholders can respond to those messages with the required information and we’ll automatically match it to the correct transaction.

Ramp currently allows you to set company-wide thresholds for Receipt and Memo requirements as well as turn on the ability for cardholders to code their transactions:

1. Receipt Requirements: For any transaction above the designated threshold all employees will be prompted to upload receipts to Ramp right after their transaction occurs. The default is $75. To adjust: Settings → Expense Policy → Receipt Needed Threshold
2. Memo Requirements: Similar to Receipt Requirements, you can turn on the requirement for employees to include memos for their transactions. To adjust: Settings → Expense Policy → Memo Needed Threshold
3. Editable Fields (Cardholder Coding): In the event cardholders need to adjust the automatically coded Expense Account, Department, and Location information on a per transaction basis you can enable the ability to do so (by default, they cannot). To enable: Settings → Expense Policy → Editable Fields
4. Additional Account Security: Ramp currently offers both Google and Okta SSO requirements to be turned on by Account Administrators (making it mandatory for all users). To enable: Click Settings (top right) → Company Settings → Account Access

Communication Preferences

Ramp’s real-time notifications give Admins important visibility into what their colleagues are spending on and helps them better control their monthly finances. Ramp automatically notifies Admins about spend at both the company and personal level.

To adjust any of the following: Settings → Communication Preferences

Business Activity

1. Large Transaction Alert - Get notified when colleagues spend above a certain threshold (set by you)
2. Employee Card Declines - get alerted when a colleague’s transaction is declined because they’ve reached the spending limit on their card
3. Monthly Spend Report - Receive a report at the beginning of every month to gain awareness of what your team is spending on.
4. Savings Insights - Get alerted when there are new savings opportunities.

Personal Activity

Set your communication preferences for when and how Ramp reminds you to submit receipts for your own transactions (both in-person and digital transactions).

User Onboarding & Management

Inviting your team

Admins and Managers can invite employees onto Ramp and set them up with their initial card.

1. To invite employees: Business → People & Groups → Invite People. You can choose to invite in bulk if you have a large number of users to invite.
2. To manage invites: Business → People & Groups → Manage Invites (click on the number)

User Overview

You can invite all employees on Ramp with the right permissions. When inviting, you can choose to issue your employee a card or simply have them request spend when they join.

1. Cardholder: An employee who’s been given access to virtual and/or physical cards. They cannot change their card limits or invite others.
2. Admins: Super-users that can invite users, issue cards, set spend limits, create accounting rules, and modify all Ramp company settings.
3. Card Managers: Card Managers are trusted with a lot of responsibility within the Ramp platform - they can invite users, set their limits, see their spend and approve their requests. As such, Admins should give employees the Card Manager role if they are budget owners and trusted with company spending. These typically will be the head of departments - engineering, IT, sales, marketing. By doing so, finance teams empower these leaders to effectively manage their teams - while maintaining total oversight of the decisions and spending. This trust but verify approach is how leading finance teams are creating goodwill and effective culture within the organization.
4. Bookkeeper: Employees or third parties who are given access to activity data to help with bookkeeping. Has full access to accounting, and can have cards, but cannot issue cards.

Best Practices - Permissions, Assigning Limits, Owning Spend

Ramp offers much more control and flexibility around how modern finance leaders can implement a corporate card program. No longer do you need to share cards or have one individual reviewing expense reports every month. Before inviting cardholders onto the platform, we encourage you to think about what permissions each employee should have, and what spending capabilities they should be set up with. 

Spend Management Basics

On a basic level, Ramp enables admins to invite cardholders with specific spending privileges. These typically fall into two buckets:

• Frequent spenders (e.g. marketing, procurement, or travelers) - these employees should be invited to the Ramp platform with a monthly recurring card that closely matches their typical spend.
• Infrequent spenders (e.g. average employee) - these employees should be invited to the Ramp platform with no cards and have the ability to request to spend on a one-off basis. Typically though, companies will invite employees with a $50-100 virtual card limit for one-off incidentals or as a benefit (e.g. coffee with a colleague). Keep in mind that a single expense report costs ~$50 - so this is break-even and even better for your employees.

Eliminating Expense Reports

With Ramp, you can do away with expense reimbursements by issuing cards based on your expense policy. The easiest way to do this today is to identify which are the specific buckets of spend that your policy allows and to issue cards along these lines. Common examples:

• Annual budget for education - issue a recurring virtual card for $1000/year
• One time onboarding desk budget - issue a one-time virtual card for $500
• Recurring budget for wellness - issue a recurring virtual card for $100/month
• Additional recurring benefit for food / entertainment - issue a physical card for $15/day

Keep in mind that employees can request spend from within Ramp on an as-needed basis - so you don't need to predict everything - just the big things so you don't get hassled with many requests going forward. Managers and admins can review these requests and approve them in real-time. 

Controlling what vendors can charge

With Ramp, you can issue virtual cards to make payments to vendors. Typically, the best practice is to set up 1 virtual card per large vendor. This helps finance teams have additional control. Set a limit above which the vendor cannot overcharge you. You can also add an auto-lock date so you don't get charged for unwanted renewals. Terminate and re-issue a card anytime - without having to update the billing information of every other vendor. Keep in mind that we restrict the number of virtual cards by user to 30 - if you run up against this limit, you can always terminate your cards and combine them.

Here are some guidelines as to who should own the spend:

• IT manager - should own most of the SaaS spending. His/her team can request cards for one-off SaaS procurement.
• Marketing manager - should own most of the advertising spend. His/her team can request cards for one-off advertising needs.
• Finance manager - should own most of the finance team's spending for cost of goods sold (e.g. furnishers).

Accounting Setup

Your Implementation Manager will walk you through the basics of setting up your Accounting Integration during your onboarding experience. As a general framework, this is what to expect:

1. Integration Setup: You’ll first need to connect your accounting system to Ramp. We offer direct API integrations with QuickBooks Online, Netsuite, Xero, and Sage Intacct. We have a Universal CSV Adapter for QuickBooks Desktop as well as almost any other Accounting Software. To setup: Business → Accounting → Follow the Prompts to connect your system.
2. Mapping Ramp Concepts to your Chart of Accounts: Ramp automatically codes each transaction based on custom mapping rules that you set up during onboarding. These rules are based on:
   1. The transaction category (i.e. Advertising)
   2. The merchant (i.e. Google Ads)
   3. The cardholders Department (i.e. Marketing)
   4. The cardholders Location (i.e. NYC)