Booking Travel off Ramp: Admin guide

Overview

Ramp for Travel is the newest and fastest way to manage your travel spending from Ramp. Now, finance teams can centralize control of travel spending while allowing employees to book travel using their favorite booking platforms. From bookings to expense reporting, Ramp for Travel makes travel management much easier for your employees while giving you the same controls, insights, and automation that you’d get from a standalone travel solution.

As an admin, you now can:

1. See every active employee trip in one dashboard with complete itineraries
2. See all travel expenses related to a trip grouped by category
3. Get real-time alerts when employees spend out-of-policy per your per diem

Employees can request to travel and book wherever they want. Thanks to Ramp's receipt integrations and travel enrichment capabilities, they will spend less time submitting expenses. Finance teams will also maintain real-time visibility into their travel plans. This data is automatically generated based on the transactional data on your company Ramp cards - no more manual entry or separate travel booking platform!

Jump to: 

1. Requesting Travel & Issuing Cards
2. Managing Travel Spend & Submitting Expenses (Including Attendee Splitting)
3. Enforcing Travel Policy
4. Travel Dashboard
5. Ramp Trips for Employees
6. Travel Integrations

Requesting Travel & Issuing cards

1. Employee requests a card to travel from their Ramp dashboard. Tip: Use Card Programs to quickly issue virtual and physical cards tied to travel in bulk.
2. The travel request gets routed and approved following the approval workflow. This can be done in email, Slack, or within the Ramp dashboard.
3. The card can be restricted to specific travel spending categories.
4. Employee can book flights, hotels and use their virtual card for taxis and per diems (note that travel by train won't be included in Travel). Tip: Save your travel virtual cards within your favorite travel booking software.

See: Approval Policies.

Managing Travel Spend & Submitting Expenses

1. After a cardholder forwards their airline confirmation email to receipts@ramp.com, Ramp will automatically detect the user is going on a trip and generate an itinerary.
2. All transactions from the user during the trip will automatically be linked to a single trip.
3. Ramp will automatically surface insights on the trip to the manager and admin - including itinerary information and total costs. See the Travel Dashboard section for more details.
4. User simply has to submit receipts, memos, and other accounting information to Ramp. 

5. Transactions on these cards can be automatically coded with card-level rules to the right projects or class codes. 

6. Transactions (for restaurants and bars only) and reimbursement may also be split. For transactions, (1) click into the transaction → (2) scroll down and click "More" → (3) click the "Add Attendees" button, type in the names and click "Add attendees". On this page, you have the option to enter attendees directly or download the CSV template to upload attendees in bulk. For reimbursements, the same "Add Attendees" button will appear before you submit the reimbursement.

Note: If a cardholder exceeds their per diem spend while traveling, their transaction will be flagged, and the user will be prompted to either repay the transaction or split the bill.

See: Submitting Receipts & Memos via SMS or Email

Setting Up Travel Policy

Within Ramp, admins can define their company's Travel Policy by going to Settings > Expense Policy > Travel Policy. Please note that travel policy rules only apply when a trip has been created. Once a trip has been created and a transaction has been added to the trip, our system will only then evaluate the transaction and flag it if it violates the travel policy. Otherwise, the approval chains will behave normally.

This includes: 

1. Maximum airfare cost per one-way flight and hotel nightly rate
2. Flight booking class allowed based on flight time  
3. How long in advance you need to book
4. Maximum per diem (daily spend on restaurants, alcohol and bars, supermarket and groceries, or entertainment) and GSA rates (location-based per diem)
   Find out more about per diem here

Fill out the rules as needed and please note that this will affect all of your Ramp cards. Once implemented, Ramp will automatically flag transactions out of policy based on these rules. We do this by pulling itinerary information from the receipts forwarded to Ramp to understand everything about the trip.

Here is how this works: 

Multiple Travel Policies

Admins can now create multiple travel policies for your company based on a variety of conditions such as Ramp role, department, location and more. Available for Ramp Plus customers only.

In order to set up multiple travel policies, first set up a default travel policy by going to Settings > Expense Policy > Travel Policy. Then scroll down and click "New travel policy" where you can name the policy, set audience conditions and define travel policy rules. 

The sample video below walks through setting up a more generous travel policy for sales team who travel frequently:

Travel Dashboard

The new Travel Dashboard enables you to see all your company travel spend and details live. There are three main sections to this dashboard: 

1. Map View - see active and upcoming trips on the world map. Click into specific people to view their trip details.
2. Metrics View - see a summary of your travel spending over time, including the breakdown by category (flights, hotels, per diems, transit), top spenders or merchants, largest trip expenses, etc. Slice and dice data in any dimension you need.
3. Trips View - see a holistic list of active, upcoming, and completed trips on the dashboard.

Ramp Trips

A "Trip" on Ramp represents a grouping of transactions and reimbursements that are associated with a single Trip. Trips can be created in several ways:

1. Trips are automatically generated as users spend on their Ramp cards and forward their receipts to receipts@ramp.com. This confirms their itinerary.
2. Cardholders can also create a trip manually by clicking into a transaction from the trip and clicking "Add to Trip" at the bottom of the drawer. The next panel will allow them to create a new trip and showcase all the transactions between those dates that can be selected and added to an existing trip).
3. Managers, admins, and owners may create trips for others.

To view a trip, cardholders can click on a transaction tied to a trip and click "View Trip" in the banner. To add a transaction to a trip, they can click "Add to Trip." Within a single Trip, cardholders can see a full set of expenses automatically categorized for convenience: 

1. Total cost of the trip
2. Dates of the beginning and end of the trip
3. Source and destination of the trip
4. Airline transactions (and links to flight itinerary)
5. Lodging transactions (and links to lodging details)
6. Ground transportation (e.g. Uber / Lyft)
7. Per Diem (any spend on restaurants/grocery/alcohol/entertainment during the trip)
8. Miscellaneous (any misc. spend that falls outside of the above categories, etc.)

Managers, admins, and owners can make changes to a trip with the following instructions:

1. Go to Expenses tab and select Travel
2. Click on the relevant user to whom the trip is assigned
3. Utilize options to Delete Trip or Add Expenses/Submit Reimbursements

Trips cannot be created with overlapping dates for a single user. They may be created for retroactive dates as well as future dates. Any reimbursement or transaction can be tied to a trip, regardless of whether the trip dates were before or after the reimbursement or transaction date. 

To add an existing reimbursement to an existing trip, please follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to Expenses 
2. Click on Reimbursements
3. Click on the History sub-tab
4. Search for the reimbursement that you would like to add to a trip and click on it
5. Click on the three dots in the bottom right-hand corner of the reimbursement

To add a new reimbursement to a trip, please follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to Expenses 
2. Click on Reimbursements
3. Click on Create Reimbursement
4. In the What's it for? section, toggle the bar that says Is this a travel expense?
5. Click the drop-down to add the reimbursement to an existing trip or create a new trip
6. Click on Submit when all required fields have been completed

Travel Integrations

With Ramp, you can use your Ramp cards safely and easily with your favorite online booking platform - all transactions and itinerary information will show up on Ramp once receipts are submitted.

For companies that would like to use a managed travel solution (not recommended unless you are spending a significant amount on travel company-wide), Ramp has direct integrations with a few partners that will automatically send a receipt and itinerary information to the Ramp platform upon booking - making your life even easier. Check out the list of partners below and feel free to mention Ramp sent you!

1. Melon: https://www.corporatetraveler.us/en-us 
2. Travel Perk: https://www.travelperk.com/