Overview

Ramp offers customers the ability to get more spend under management with an automated procurement experience that’s easy to adopt by the whole company.

With Ramp’s procurement offering, your business will be able to centralize intake forms, build flexible approval flows, and seamlessly match purchase orders to the corresponding bills within Bill Pay. 

Jump to:

• Creating a Procurement Spend Program
• Requesting from a Procurement Spend Program
• Matching Purchase Orders to Bills in Ramp

Creating a Procurement Spend Program

To set-up a procurement flow within Ramp begin by setting up a Spend Program intended to capture employees purchase requests. Please note, only individuals with Admin permissions are able to set-up spend programs on Ramp. 

Navigate to the Spend Program tab and click the “New Spend Program” button.

After entering a name and description for the spend program, you will select how the spend program will be paid for once approved. You have two options available:

• Issue a virtual card - If you select this option, when this spend program is approved, the requestor will be issued a new virtual card associated with the program. You can learn more about virtual card issuing here
• Issue a Ramp Purchase Order (recommended for procurement spend programs) - If you select this option, when this spend program is approved, a purchase order associated with a specified vendor will be issued. This purchase order can later be matched to an uploaded invoice within Ramp Bill Pay which will be paid by your business’ AP team.

Next, you can add questions to customize your procurement intake form. You can specify the question type from the following options:

• Vendor - request employees to select from a drop-down of existing vendors
• Text - free form text box
• Single Select - radio button select of custom options
• Multi Select - select multiple options from list
• File Upload - field to allow for upload of any relevant files for the spend program request
• Link - field to allow for any relevant links to be shared
• Number - field to allow input of numbers
• Date - field to allow input of date

Finally, 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) and which individuals should be involved with the spend program’s approvals.

For approvals, Ramp will automatically default to the global Spend Request Approval Policy configured within Company Settings, however, you also have the option to set a custom approval policy for the specific spend program.

Note, the custom approval policy will only apply to 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)

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

 

Requesting from a Procurement Spend Program

Employees can request a procurement related spend program from the same place they request any other spend on Ramp. Employees can click “Request Spend” and select the Procurement program that is available to them. The requestor will need to input info such as which vendor the request is for, how much the need to request, and answers for any of the additional questions the intake form asks. 

When selecting the vendor, requestors have the option to select an existing vendor within Ramp or request spend for an entirely new vendor. If they select a new vendor, when the request is submitted and approved, the new vendor will be created within Ramp and added to the Vendor Management tab. 

Once, the requestor has inputted all the necessary details, they can submit their request and have it routed to the appropriate approvers.Their pending requests will appear within their “My Ramp” dashboard.

Those on the approval chain will receive a notification via email and slack (if enabled) when they are up next for approval. Learn more about spend program approvals here. 

Once the request receives all its approvals, a purchase order will be created. Purchase orders are accessible both via the vendor profile in Vendor management or via the dedicated purchase order tab within Bill Pay

Matching Purchase Orders to Bills in Ramp

Ramp allows you to match invoices within Bill Pay to the purchase orders created through the spend request flow. When you receive an invoice for the vendor you have an associated purchase order for, you can select to match that invoice and purchase order together. 

 

When you bill against the PO, you will see the remaining spend available on the PO.

At this time, Ramp does not block the AP team from continuing to match bills to fully filled POs. If the bill does cause the PO to exceed its limit, it will display within the PO.