User roles: Overview

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
• IT Admins
• View-Only Admins
• 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:

1. 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.
2. Spend & User Management: This includes inviting new team members to use Ramp, setting individual limits, and monitoring balances and transactions.
3. Accounting: Customizing Ramp to match the company's existing accounting structure, integrating accounting software with Ramp, viewing statement history.
4. 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.

Suppose you have a preference as to whether your admins can approve and review their spend. In that case, there is a toggle in the Company tab > Expense policy under spend requests and bills areas for enabling or disabling that capability. If an admin has a manager and self-issuing in the settings is disabled, the manager will review the admin's spend requests and bills. If self-issuing is enabled, admins can 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 and funds that are specifically issued to them. Bookkeepers do not have the ability to issue spend to others or make company payments. Bookkeepers can:

1. Integrate accounting software with Ramp
2. Code transactions
3. Sync Ramp financial data to the integrated accounting software
4. Customize Ramp Accounting settings 
5. View and download the company's Ramp financial data and statements

Note: Administrators can now assign bookkeepers additional manager permissions. For more details, see the article on editing a user's role.

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 and funds, 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 or funds, 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 funds or request can request spend. Each Employee also gains access to their individual Ramp dashboard, where they can view their cards and funds, 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 and funds, 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 and funds if the profile already exists on their team. They are unable to issue cards and funds when inviting a user.

• Like Admins, Managers can change their own spending 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 spend they're creating, limits on those cards and funds, and 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.

Note: Administrators can now assign manager permissions to bookkeepers and IT admins. For more details, see the article on editing a user's role.