Bill Pay vendors and vendor owners

Overview

We know your relationship with your vendors is incredibly important. That's why Ramp Bill Pay makes it easy to create and manage vendors, pay them on time, and maintain all the necessary information relevant to your business with them. 

Jump to:

1. Creating and managing vendors
2. Vendor owners
3. Vendor notifications
4. Bulk upload vendors
5. Removing vendors
6. Vendor notifications

Creating and managing a vendor

Ramp supports multiple methods for vendor creation. The most straightforward is to simply create the vendor during the bill creation process! 

You can also click the New vendor button in the upper right of the Vendor overview page (Vendors > Overview), or skip ahead to the section on bulk uploads.

Match vendors in Ramp with existing vendors in your accounting software:  

If your accounting provider is connected to Ramp, we will automatically search for any existing vendors that seem relevant for the bill you've created. If no vendor is found, we can automatically create a new vendor in your accounting software to maintain a 1:1 relationship.

If you create a vendor using Bill Pay and it is not matched to an existing vendor in your accounting provider, a new one will be created for you. It's important to exercise caution and not create duplicate vendors.

Note that you can also assign default accounting preferences for invoice line items under your vendor settings!

See this page for more information about Bill Pay Accounting: Bill Pay Accounting

Updating vendor contact info: Your point of contact with a vendor may change over time, and that's why you can update the contact information for vendors at any time with Ramp Bill Pay. 

One thing to note here, we lock the details that were added during vendor setup currently, but you can click the Add another button when editing your vendor to add new contact and set it as the default. (Keep in mind, only the default vendor contact will receive communications from Ramp at this time).

Retrieving payment details from your vendor: Our Bill Pay product can securely retrieve payment details directly from your vendors via email in a request made directly through Ramp.

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. For more information, please see our Requesting vendor details article.

Vendor owners

A Vendor owner is a Ramp user that you assign who is responsible for maintaining relationships with, and often 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 Vendor overview and updating there.

It's important to note that only one vendor owner can be assigned per vendor.

Using Vendor Owners: Vendor Owners can 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 Vendors tab on Ramp and click the three-dot 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 the steps here.

Once you've selected the option for your bulk upload, download the template CSV file and fill it out with as much information as you have.

Important to note: There is currently no way to bulk update vendors (e.g., to change vendor contact emails).

Required and Optional Fields

We require the following fields:

• Vendor name: Please ensure the vendor name in the CSV matches exactly the vendor name in your accounting provider. Otherwise, duplicate vendors may be created.
• Vendor contact email: This should be your point of contact with the vendor. In a pinch, you can substitute your email, but entering "N/A" will cause an error. 
• Vendor Owner email: Learn more about Vendor Owners here ↗️
• Country code: The two-digit country code 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 the state blank if the country is non-US.

Additionally, we support the following optional fields:

• 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 can request those details via a secure link if "True" is entered in column L under Request payment details. The request will be sent to the contact email listed in column B.

• 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

Once you've clicked Begin import, you'll have a chance to clean up the data before finalizing! 

Common Errors:

If you are running into errors while uploading your file, there's a likely culprit that's easy to fix.

Here are 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.
• Ensure that all 4 required fields are filled in the correct format. 
• The file size may be too large. Ramp can currently handle up to 1,000 vendors at a time, but consider a smaller upload if you're having trouble

Removing vendors

To remove a bill pay vendor from Ramp you can follow these steps:

1. Select the vendor from the Overview section of the Vendors tab
2. Click Edit vendor
3. Scroll to the Danger zone section and click Delete vendor

Keep in mind that vendors with bills that are processing or pending approval cannot be deleted at this time. You'll want to fully process or cancel/archive any bills for vendors that you'd like to remove.

We also do not support deleting vendors associated with card transactions at this time.

Vendor notifications

Email

• 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)