Overview
Ramp provides a range of user roles and permissions, allowing companies to manage their financial operations effectively while maintaining the necessary level of control and security. These roles include Admins and owners, Bookkeepers, Accounting Firms, Employees, Managers, AP Clerks, Assistants, and Guests, each with specific access levels and responsibilities. By understanding and utilizing these user roles, businesses can optimize their spend management processes and ensure a seamless financial workflow within their organization.
Jump to:
- Admins and Owners
- Bookkeepers (Internal)
- Accounting Firm (External)
- Employees
- Managers
- AP Clerks
- Assistants (previously Copilots)
- Guests
Admins and Owners
Business Owner and Business Admin roles have the same permissions and are the super-users of Ramp. They are accountable for managing business-level considerations for your company's Ramp account. As a result, Admins have access to Ramp's full capabilities and controls, and are responsible for:
- Set-Up: Setting up company-wide controls for Ramp, which includes linking company bank accounts, setting up auto-pay, inviting new team members, applying monitoring controls on the business level, and more.
- Card & User Management: This includes inviting new team members to use Ramp, setting individual limits, and monitoring balances and transactions.
- Accounting: Customizing Ramp to match the company's existing accounting structure, integrating accounting software with Ramp, viewing statement history.
- Savings: Redeeming earned cash back, accessing savings insights and our partner reward program.
While the number of Ramp Admins you can invite to your business is not restricted, we recommend proceeding with care. With great power comes great responsibility.
Admins may have a manager when approving and reviewing spending; however, they are not required to have one. Only managers and admins can be set as another admin's manager.
If you would like your admins to approve and review their own spend, there is a toggle in the setting controls page under the cards, reimbursement, and transactions areas for enabling or disabling that feature. If an admin has a manager and self-issuing in the settings is disabled, the manager will review the admin's cards, reimbursements, and transactions. If self-issuing is enabled, admins will be able to approve their own spend regardless of whether they have a manager.
Bookkeepers (Internal)
Bookkeepers are internal employees who are given access to the company's Ramp activity data to help with bookkeeping. Bookkeepers have access to all Accounting capabilities in their Ramp dashboards at https://ramp.com/accounting/manage and can still use Ramp cards that are specifically issued to them. Bookkeepers do not have the ability to issue spend to others or make company payments. Bookkeepers can:
- Integrate accounting software with Ramp
- Code transactions
- Sync Ramp financial data to the integrated accounting software
- Customize Ramp Accounting settings
- View and download the company's Ramp financial data and statements
Accounting Firm (External)
The Accounting Firm role enables third parties - such as external accountants - to access your company's Ramp instance in a secure fashion. By connecting with your Accounting Firm, you enable administrators at the firm to assign staff to your account according to the roles you selected in the invite. Below are the following roles you can choose from when connecting with your Accounting Firm:
- Administrator: Super-users who can invite users, issue cards, set spend limits, create accounting rules, and modify all Ramp company settings.
- Bookkeeper & AP Clerk: Employees who are given access to activity data to help with expenses and accounting and can view, create, edit, and initiate approval processes for bills. They cannot issue cards and do not have the ability to release funds.
- AP Clerk: AP Clerks can view, create, edit, and initiate approval processes for bills. However, they cannot release payments.
External users assigned to your Ramp account via the Accounting Firm connection will populate in your People tab with the "external" label. Note that you cannot assign managers to external users, nor can you make them managers of internal employees or change their associated department / location. However, as with internal users, you can issue them virtual cards, set them as Assistants, and lock their accounts.
To edit settings related to your Accounting Firm, go to the Accounting Firm tab located in the Company tab.
Employees
Employees are all other company employees who can make purchases through their individual Ramp cards. Each Employee can be issued physical or virtual cards or request cards. Each Employee also gains access to their individual Ramp dashboard, where they can view their cards, associated monthly limits, and current balance. Employees can text or email receipts and memos to Ramp, which are automatically matched to the right transaction.
Managers
Managers are users who can invite, issue cards, terminate users, and oversee the spending of their own teams. As they invite their people to Ramp, those new users will be added to their team automatically. Managers then automatically gain oversight over all their team’s transactions and receive spend and limit alerts and insights.
Note: Managers can only issue cards if the profile already exists on their team. They are unable to issue cards when inviting a user.
- Like Admins, Managers can change their own card limits and extend Ramp invites to their team. However, you can set up additional steps in approval workflows if you prefer Managers to require additional layers of approvals for cards they're creating and limits on those cards, as well as for reimbursement approvals. Head to Settings → Expense policy → Spend Requests or Settings → Expense policy → Expense Approvals
- Unlike Admins, Managers do not have access to company-wide spending, company settings, accounting functionality, the ability to make payments, or the ability to view their employees' card numbers (they only see the last four digits for security purposes).
Typically, companies promote the heads of departments as Managers on Ramp in order to grant them oversight of their team’s spending. Managers can invite other managers under them as needed.
AP Clerks
This is not a distinct user role on Ramp but a privilege that can be appended to an account. By default, only owners and admins can access Bill Pay and submit drafts / approve. If you head to Bills, then Settings, you can choose who you would like to add as an AP Clerk. Any level of user can be added as a clerk, allowing them to create Bill drafts.
Assistants (previously Copilots)
Like the AP Clerk, this is not a distinct user role on Ramp but a privilege that can be appended to an account. The Assistant role allows individuals to view transactions, submit receipts, and fill out transaction details on behalf of another user. Most commonly, this is used for Executive Assistants to support their Executives in these ways. More information on the role and how to add an Assistant can be found here.
Guests
The Guest User is a role with limited access to Ramp. This role is great for temporary employees or candidates who need access to spend on Ramp or request reimbursements but shouldn't have full access to the platform. For more information about Guest functionality, read more here.