Set up your expense policy

Overview

Ramp enables your business to implement company expense policy right into the platform. This enables you to properly control and report on spend across the company. This article covers the different components of your expense policy and how to set them up. You can manage any of the below using the Expense policy tab in the settings bar in your Ramp dashboard. 

1. Upload your expense policy document - require users to review and sign an official expense policy document.
2. Define approval workflows - set up approval chains for card issuance, reimbursements, bills, transaction reviews, vendor creation, and more.
3. Define your spend guidelines - configure alerts that will trigger if employees spend on the wrong thing.
4. Define submission requirements - implement logic for requiring receipts, memos, accounting fields, and other info.

Jump to: 

• How to set up your expense policy
  1. Upload your policy document
  2. Define approval workflows
  3. Define spend guidelines
  4. Define submission requirements
  5. Use the employee handbook

How to set up your expense policy

1. Upload your policy document

Ramp enables you to upload your company's expense policy straight to the Ramp platform and ask your employees to sign the expense policy when they join the company. This ensures that employees are aware of all the requirements when spending on behalf of the company. Upload your company policy here.

We'll send out an email letting your team know to sign, and they can always review what they signed under their employee handbook.

For admins and managers, you can see if a user has signed under the People tab (select the user and hover over the icon):

2. Define approval workflows

Approval policies on Ramp govern the steps required to approve anything from card issuance, to transactions, reimbursements, bill payments, and more. Need to require managers to review each of their teams' expenses? No problem. Need to notify your Finance team if a bill's total exceeds a certain amount? You got it.

You can define who needs to approve based on specific criteria, determine what order the approvals should be granted in, and keep people informed via notifications. Get started by going to your expense policy settings.

Ramp makes it easy to customize approval workflows so admins can define the right set of people to approve expenses based on the amount. 

Approval policies can be set for:

• Transactions and Reimbursements
• New card requests (and card edits)
  • For businesses using Ramp Procurement, check out the article here
• Bill payments
• Vendor changes
• all utilizing an easy to understand workflow framework!

3. Define spend guidelines

Spend guidelines are rules that Finance teams can implement to further define what is allowed to be purchased on Ramp Cards.

Travel policy: This governs what is allowed to be purchased when it comes to travel, including per diems, hotel nightly rates, advanced booking requirements, and more. Check out our admin guides for more on this:

• Travel bookings off Ramp
• Travel bookings with Ramp Travel

With Policy rules, we allow your team to leverage best in class AI to add warnings signaling when spend may need a second look. You can also be more strict in setting rules that require action by an approver or the spender to resolve. 

The Global approvals and restrictions section allows you to block spend with certain merchants or make it easier to spend with critical merchants like ad spend and subscriptions. You can also set preferences regarding common employee actions.

4. Define submission requirements

Expense requirements, or required fields, are the rules that employees must follow to properly submit receipts, memos, and other items after spending on Ramp.

Ramp makes it easy to implement rules for employees to submit the necessary information. After an employee transacts on a Ramp card, Ramp will automatically notify the user when they need to submit receipts or memos for their card transactions. And different rules can be set for card spend and reimbursement requests.

You can also configure different policies for cards you set up for different uses, like subscription spend, executive cards, or general expenses.

5. Use the employee handbook

With Ramp, finance teams have unparalleled control over their company spend. Employees have access to the necessary information to understand the policies and procedures within the employee handbook. 

Sections include:

1. Policy document
2. Travel policy
3. Submission requirements
4. Approval structure