Overview
For companies that require additional review of card 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 spend, and recurring SaaS spend).
Meanwhile, other expenses, such as per diem, travel expenses, 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 spend. 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 2 places. Ramp recommends reviewing from the Inbox tab (where all approvals for reimbursements, transactions, bills, and card requests live), reviewers can also navigate to Expenses > Transactions to see all transactions.
Inbox tab
Reviewers will see a notification in the Inbox tab that calls out 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 > 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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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 of Expenses > Transactions
Grouped expenses: there are several fields in priority of: 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 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 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 that'll be displayed at the top is the section with the most recent expense transaction date. So the section takes on the date of the most recent transaction
- For card requests and bills, will be based on most recent request date
If you certain employees are using cards as you would expect them to (for example, if you’ve flagged transactions multiple times), 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.
Transactions tab
The Expenses > Transactions tab has several sub-tabs for additional visibility and filtering on transactions.
- Overview - Includes all transactions that you are allowed 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 - Includes transactions that require review based on the company's approval policy. This includes cleared transactions that do not have missing items. Pending transactions and transactions with flags from policy rules will not appear here.
- Resolved - Includes transactions that have been manually or automatically approved, transactions that were manually or automatically flagged and approved, transactions that have been flagged for repayment and were repaid. This can include pending transactions that were approved.
- Out-of-policy - Includes transactions that were manually or automatically flagged as out-of-policy and have not been resolved yet.
- 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 Transactions > Overview. Admins may also remind managers to review reimbursements in the Reimbursements > Needs review tab. Sending a reminder to employees and managers will notify them via a single 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.
See below for a view of the Missing items reminders drawer. Managers may also send bulk reminders in the Inbox tab when selecting multiple transactions.
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.
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 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 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).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- What does "Requirements completed" mean? If a transaction is displayed as “Requirements completed,” that means the cardholder has submitted the missing items required by the expense policy (if any were required). If a transaction's receipt shows "Auto-approved," that means 2 out of 3 of the heuristics on the receipt matched with 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) and see all the transactions that require approval at the company. Admins can review anyone's transactions at the company.
- 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.
- Can I use approval flows for live transactions? Since transactions happen in real-time, there's no way to provide a live approval for a transaction. The best way to control your employees' spend on their 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 cards tab by clicking on a card, or set up as you create a new card.