Overview
Your relationship with your vendor is just as important as paying them on time. We make sure to keep accurate contact and payment details and empower your employees to manage both.
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Creating a Vendor
Bill Pay knows your relationship with your vendor is incredibly important. Being able to contact them, to pay them, and to store contract information are effective in maintaining that relationship. So, you have the ability to do all the above. To create a Vendor, either do so during the bill creation process or on the Vendor Management page.
If your ERP is connected, we will search for any existing vendors within your ERP to match to. However, if no vendor is found, Bill Pay will automatically create a new vendor in your accounting software to maintain a 1:1 relationship. We recommend you keep the latest payment details, contact information, and contract documents.
- Retrieving payment details from your vendor: Bill Pay can retrieve ACH details of your vendor in two ways. The first is by pulling payment details provided for the vendor in the invoice and the second is using a secure, one-time link that Ramp sends to the email provided for the vendor requesting their ACH details. We notify the vendor immediately and regularly after the first request so we gather the payment details needed to make your payment on time. If the payment details aren't gathered in time (which is rare!), we will notify you and request you manually release the payment. A successful payment signals we successfully received accurate payment details for your vendor. For more information on Bill Pay payment methods, view this page: Bill payment methods
Selecting and editing a Vendor: if your bill is for an existing Vendor, we will recommend it on the Bill creation page. Simply select it and their payment details and contact information will populate into the bill. You can edit any information on the Bill Vendors page. It's also a great place to view total and last 30 day spend, the vendor owner, recent invoices, and contracts and documents stored on Bill Pay.
Vendors in your accounting software: as mentioned earlier, any new vendor created in Bill Pay will be created in your accounting software. It's important that the information in both systems match, so make sure not to create duplicate vendors. When you create a vendor in Bill Pay, you can assign a GL category so that future payments will be automatically assigned to this category. See this page for more information about Bill Pay Accounting: Bill Pay Accounting
Vendor Owners
Vendor Owners are a way to assign responsibility of relationship with and payments to a particular vendor. An employee who manages your Facebook Ads spend, for example, is a great candidate for Vendor Owner of Facebook Ads.
Assigning a Vendor Owner: you can assign a Vendor Owner either when you are paying a bill to a new vendor or by clicking into a vendor on the Bill Vendors page and adding one there.
Using Vendor Owners: Vendor Owners should be used when creating Approval Layers. For each new layer, add a Vendor Owner to have them involved in bills where their vendor is being paid. They will be notified when it's their time to approve the bill. See more about approvals here: Bill Pay Approvals and AP Clerks
Bulk Vendor Upload
You can migrate multiple vendors at once to help you onboard to Ramp Bill Pay. To get started, navigate to the "Vendor Management" tab on Ramp, and click the three dots menu at the top of the page. From there you have the option to either upload vendors with or without tax information. If you would like to upload vendors with Tax Information please follow steps here.
From the side panel that appears, download the template CSV file and fill it out with as much information as you have.
Required and Optional Fields
We require the following fields:
- Vendor name: Please ensure the vendor name in the CSV matches exactly to the vendor name in your ERP. Otherwise, duplicate vendors can be created.
- Vendor contact email: If you don't have a vendor's email, please enter your own email. Entering "N/A" will cause an error.
- Vendor Owner email: Learn more about Vendor Owners here ↗️
- Payment method: Enter "ACH", "Check", or "Other"
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Country Codes: The country your vendor is based out of
- State: If the vendor is based out of the USA, you are also required to input their state abbreviation (e.g. NY for New York). Can leave state blank if country is non-US.
Additionally, we support the following optional fields:
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ACH details (routing number, accounting number): Verify all account details are correct. CSV file formatting can often cut off preceding 0s (e.g. CSV may change 0123 to 123) or change numbers to scientific format (e.g. CSV may change 123 to 1.23E+2).
- Note, if no ACH details are provided for a vendor, Ramp will automatically email your vendors and collect the vendor payment details for you.
- Mailing address (address line, city, state, country, zip code): If you do decide to enter an address for a vendor, the remaining address fields for that vendor will become required (e.g. if you input a city, then address line 1, state, country, and zip code will become required fields
After you upload the completed template, you'll see a preview of the vendors with the information you entered. Don't worry if you don't see all the details for each vendor.
If everything looks good, click "Add Vendors" and you'll be able to pay your vendors on Ramp Bill Pay.
Common Errors:
If you are running into errors while uploading your file, there's a likely culprit that's easy to fix. Here's a few helpful reminders to get you up and running.
- Ensure that all fields are correctly formatted. Unsuccessful uploads are most often caused by missing or incorrect fields. See above for a list of Required and Optional fields.
- Before uploading, verify that all 4 required fields are filled in the correct format.
- The file size may be too large. Ramp can currently handle up to to 1,000 vendors at a time.
Vendor notifications
- Request for payment details (users: Vendor)
- Reminder to add your bank details before the payment date (users: Vendor)
- Reminder to add your bank details on and after the payment date (users: Vendor)
- Vendor bank details added successfully (users: AP Clerk and Admin, if bill originators)
- Vendor bank details failed to add bank details (users: AP Clerk and Admin, if bill originators)
- Payment was sent (users: Vendor)
- Payment was delivered (users: Vendor)
- Payment was failed, returned, or changed (users: Vendor)