Overview
For companies that require additional review of transactions, whether for compliance or other monitoring purposes, Ramp supports transaction approvals directly within the platform. This feature allows managers and Finance teams to review and approve spend that employees have used their company card for.
Jump to:
- Best practices
- How to set up expense review policies
- How to review transactions
- Sending reminders to employees for missing items
- Getting notified of transactions requiring review
- How transaction reviews relate to accounting syncs
Best Practices
We recommend clients design their expense policies based on who is spending and what they spend on. For example, you may determine that certain types of spend don't require manager review (such as executive spend, ad spending, and recurring SaaS spend).
Meanwhile, other expenses, such as per diem, travel, or day-to-day operating expenses, may be more important to track.
For this reason, we enable and encourage you to configure policies that allow you to save even more time without sacrificing the need to monitor and control company spending. Our solution helps in a few ways:
- Eases the administrative burden on card managers by decreasing the volume of transactions they need to be personally responsible for
- Distributes ownership and accountability for expenses
- Gives Finance teams the confidence to distribute cards to employees who may not have been entrusted with company cards in the past
- Allows businesses to transition expenses from manual reimbursements to corporate cards (increasing savings via cashback and providing better visibility and control over expenses)
How to set up transaction review policies
Transaction reviews are set up within the company expense policy. We've written a detailed guide for Admins and Finance teams here.
How to review transactions
Reviews may be completed in two places. Ramp recommends reviewing from the Inbox tab (where all approvals for reimbursements, transactions, bills, and spend requests live). Reviewers can also navigate to Expenses & travel > Card transactions to see all transactions.
Inbox tab
Reviewers will see a notification in the Inbox tab indicating how many items need your attention. The inbox does not include transactions with missing items, transactions with exemptions, or pending transactions that have not cleared. Transactions are considered ready for review once all required fields are satisfied and the transaction has cleared. The excluded transactions can be viewed under Expenses & travel > Transactions.
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 make bulk approvals by selecting the empty checkboxes or checkboxes for an entire group.
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Reject: If you choose to reject a transaction, you have the option to either Request changes, formerly the option to flag transactions that you need additional information on, or are out of policy, or Request repay. 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 “Flagged” sub-tab of Expenses & travel > Card transactions
Grouped expenses: There are several fields in priority: expenses associated with a Trip, then Spend Limit, then cardholder. All expenses within a group can be approved at once.
- When an expense is tied to a Trip, all expenses will be tied to it under a section named "[Cardholder's name] Trip to [Location and date]
- If an expense is not tied to a trip group, Ramp will group expenses by card or funds under a section named "[Cardholder's name] · [Card name]"
- When an expense is not tied to a card or a trip, all pending expenses will be grouped by the cardholder and under a section named "[Cardholder's name]"
- When a reviewer filters or sorts on the table, all groupings will be removed in place of the filter
- Ordering of group sections will be based on the most recent transaction date for transaction tables and the most recent submitted date for reimbursement tables
- For transaction tables, the section displayed at the top contains the most recent expense transaction date. So, the section takes on the date of the most recent transaction
- Spend requests and bills will be based on the most recent request date
If certain employees use cards or funds as you would expect them to (for example, if you’ve flagged transactions multiple times), you can lock their Ramp card(s) or funds until further action is taken. You can do this by navigating to the Funds & Cards tab, searching for their card(s) or funds, then clicking on it and activating the “Lock” icon.
Card transactions tab
The Expenses & travel > Card transactions tab has several sub-tabs for additional visibility and transaction filtering.
- Overview—This includes all transactions that you are allowed to view at your organization, depending on your role. For admins, this includes transactions from all employees. For managers, this includes their direct team.
- Needs review—This category includes transactions that require review based on the company's approval policy. It also includes cleared transactions that do not have missing items. Pending transactions and transactions with flags from policy rules will not appear here.
- Flagged - This includes transactions that were manually or automatically flagged as out-of-policy and have not yet been resolved.
- Fully approved - Includes transactions that have been manually or automatically approved, transactions that were manually or automatically flagged and approved, and transactions that have been flagged for repayment and were repaid. This can include pending approved transactions.
- Declined - Includes declined transactions.
Sending reminders to employees for missing items
Reviewers may also remind employees to submit missing items, and admins may remind managers to review transactions in Expenses & travel > Card transactions. Admins may also remind managers to review reimbursements in the Expenses & travel > Reimbursements > Needs review tab. Sending a reminder to employees and managers will notify them via email with a list of transactions needing attention.
- The "Remind" button for managers will allow managers to remind employees to submit memos and receipts
- The "Remind" button for admins will allow admins to remind managers AND allow them to remind employees to submit missing items.
Below is a view of the reminder drawer for missing items. Managers may also send bulk reminders in the Inbox tab when selecting multiple transactions. Please note: Ramp does not yet support reminders for repayments since a notification is sent when it is requested.
Getting notified of transactions requiring review
Managers will receive a weekly reminder email advising them of transactions that require approval. They can click on the email to be redirected automatically to the transaction review page.
Request changes
If a transaction put on a Ramp card is out of policy, managers can request changes to the employee after rejecting the expense. This will notify the employee and the finance team and start an email conversation. The Finance team will be able to request that the employee pay back the company according to the company's expense policy.
Read more here: Flagging transactions.
How transaction reviews relate to accounting sync
Unlike legacy expense reporting systems, Ramp's 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 they are fully clear within the VISA network. The transaction review framework was built to help monitor the legitimacy of transactions and enforce your expense policy with minimal disruption to your accounting processes.
If you'd like to sync only transactions that have been approved, filter for "Approval status > Fully approved" transactions within the Accounting tab. Once you have your filters applied, you'll see a +Save as new view button in the upper right. Saving this view will ensure you only sync "Fully approved" charges.
In the event that a transaction is matched to a bill:
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The transaction is then approved
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Missing required items will be dismissed
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What does "Requirements completed" mean?
If a transaction is displayed as “Requirements completed,” the cardholder has submitted the missing items required by the expense policy (if any were required). If a transaction's receipt shows "Auto-approved," two out of three of the heuristics on the receipt matched the transaction's heuristics (e.g., merchant, amount, time).
How can admins view their direct team?
Admins can click "X" on the default filter for their team ("Direct Team: Arletta Cheryl Morris" in the above image) to see all the transactions that require approval at the company and review anyone's transactions.
What happens if an admin approves a transaction and there were other approvers in the chain before them?
It'll skip the earlier approvers in the chain.
What does it mean if a workflow is "Inactive"?
This just means no cards or funds currently have that policy configured. If you apply the policy to a card or funds, the inactive badge will be removed.
Can I use approval flows for live transactions?
Since transactions happen in real-time, there's no way to provide live approval. The best way to control your employees' spend on cards is to use category restrictions and single transaction limits (e.g. can't spend more than $500 on any transaction). This can all be done on the Funds and Cards tab by clicking on a card or set up as you create a new card.