Overview

For companies that require an additional review by managers on the card transactions of their teams after they spend, Ramp recommends setting up a Manager Review step. Once the admin turns this on in the "Expense Policy" settings, managers will be required to review transactions on a weekly basis for anyone in their team.

Best Practices

We recommend clients to design their Card Expense Policies based on who is spending and what they are spending on. You may determine that certain types of spend do not need manager review (most clients exclude things like Executive spend, Ad spend, and recurring spend like SaaS and subscriptions). 

Manager Transaction Reviews are typically implemented for spend programs like per diems, travel, field employees, and cards issued to individual contributors and front-line managers. This helps in a few ways:

• Eases the administrative burden on Card Managers by decreasing the volume of transactions they need to monitor.
• Distributes ownership and accountability to Managers who are more familiar with the expenses of their team
• Allows you to distribute cards to employees that you may not have felt comfortable with in the past
• Allows you to transition expenses from manual reimbursements to corporate cards (increasing your savings via cashback and providing better visibility and control over your expenses)

Setup Review Policy (Admins)

As an admin, you can set up the Review Policy in the Expense Policy settings tab. Click "Edit" on the Card Policy that you'd like to enable Manager Review for. Scroll to the "Review & Enforcement" section and set Manager Approval to Required. After saving changes, any transaction that happens on cards tied to this policy will require manager review.

 

Transaction reviews are single-tier only - meaning they only require the manager or the admin to review. We don't support multi-tiered approvals for transaction review at this time. The reason for this is that most of the approvals have happened before the employee has spent on the card thanks to the approval policy. 

Reviewing Transactions (Managers)

Reviews may be done in 2 places. When you log into Ramp, you may navigate to the Inbox Tab (where all approvals for reimbursements, transactions, bills, and card requests live, or you may navigate to the Transactions Tab with two sub-tabs: “Needs Review” and “Out of Policy”. 

You’ll see a notification in both the Inbox Tab and “Needs Review” sub-tab that calls out how many transactions need your attention. As you review these transactions, you can take two main actions on each:

• Approve: If the transaction in question falls within your expense policy, or you’ve authorized it, click on the Approve button. Ramp also allows you to take these actions in bulk (you’ll see a green “Approve All” button, as well as empty check boxes next to each transaction allowing you to select multiple transactions and take action on them together).

• Flag: To flag transactions that you need additional information on, or are out of policy, click on the Red “Flag” icon. A text box will appear, where you can enter information as to why you’re flagging the transaction as out of policy or ask for more details. Ramp will start an email thread between you and the cardholder to collect this additional information. Responses will be added to the transaction in Ramp. Once a transaction is flagged, this will move the transaction to the “Out of Policy” sub-tab.

Admins can click "X" on the default filter for their team ("Direct Team: Arletta Cheryl Morris" in the above image) and see all the transactions that require approval at the company. Admins can review anyone's transactions at the company.

Transactions on the “Out of Policy” sub-tab require additional action to be taken by you, and also call them out to your Finance Team.

• You may notice that some transactions are auto-flagged on this sub-tab. Your Finance Team has set certain rules that flag transactions based on the size of the transaction, the type of transaction it is, or the Department that made the transaction. Make sure to review these and approve any that are authorized.
• After you receive additional information from a cardholder for a transaction that you have flagged you can either leave it flagged or mark it as approved.

If you notice certain employees are abusing their privilege of having a corporate card (you’ve flagged transactions multiple times, have determined that certain transactions are truly out of policy, and have had more than one conversation with them about appropriate spending behavior) you have the ability to lock their Ramp card(s) until further action is taken. You can do this by navigating to the Cards Tab, searching for their card(s), and then clicking into the card and activating the “Lock Card” icon.

Getting Notified of Transactions Requiring Review

Managers will get notified for transactions that require approval via a weekly reminder email. They can click into that email and get redirected automatically to the transaction review page. 

Flagging Transactions

If a transaction that was put on a Ramp card was out of policy, managers can flag this transaction to the employee. This will notify the employee and the finance team, and start a conversation via email between them. The finance team will be able to request the employee to pay back the company according to the company's expense policy. 

Read more here: Flagging Transactions.

Relationship Between Reviews & Accounting Sync

Unlike legacy expense reporting systems, the Manager Transaction Review process does not create a bottleneck in your reconciliation process each month. You will still be able to code and sync transactions once the transaction fully clears within the VISA network. The Manager Transaction Review workflow was built to help monitor the legitimacy of transactions and enforce your expense policy. 

If you'd like to only sync transactions that have been approved, filter for "Approved" transactions within the accounting tab. When coding and syncing transactions on the Accounting Tab, Ramp highlights which transactions have been approved and which are still pending. You can also filter transactions based on their Transaction State (Approved, Needs Review, or Out of Policy).