Overview
Whether you’re working as part of an internal finance team, or as an accountant in practice, we understand how important it is to be able to close books quickly and use accounting data to maintain compliance obligations and regularly gather insights into business performance.
Ramp integrates with your accounting system to ensure that all of your company expenditure, whether bills, reimbursements or card charges, are all correctly classified and accounted for, so that you can generate timely financial reports. Ramp provides powerful tools to automate the process of classifying your company’s expense transactions, including classification rules and suggestions, so that you can close your books faster (for more information on how to automate your workflows, reference this article).
Ramp’s philosophy is to attempt to use multiple data points, rules, card policies and your prior classifications to speed up the process of getting the data right, while being conservative enough to eliminate the risk of getting anything wrong. We want to ensure you are always in control, so that when data is synced to your system, it is written correctly every time.
Jump to:
- How it Works
- Setup
- Settings
- Deep Links
- Filtering and Renaming Fields
- Sync
- Post Sync / Reconciliation Process
- Provider Specific Overviews
How it Works
When you securely connect Ramp to your accounting system, we:
- Retrieve all the data from the accounting system you might need to classify your spend, including your chart of accounts.
- List all of your spend in Ramp in the accounting tab, for you to review and classify.
- Allow you to set powerful rules in order to automatically classify your transactions based on merchant information and card data.
- Allow you to choose when and how your classified and reviewed data is sent to your accounting system.
You can synchronize data with your accounting system as often as you’d like.
Transactions are written to your accounting system using concepts that will be familiar to you as a user of that system. Generally speaking, card expenditure is posted as credit card transactions, while Ramp reimbursements and bills are both posted as bills and settled with bill payments. The specifics of how we sync Ramp transactions to different accounting providers are discussed in the Setup pages below.
Set up
In order to set up your accounting provider to sync with Ramp, you'll need to follow a few steps. The following articles will help you get set up with the ERP that you're using:
- QuickBooks Online (est. 5 min)
- QuickBooks Desktop (est. 15 min)
- NetSuite (est. 15 min)
- Xero (est. 5 min)
- Sage Intacct (est. 15 min)
Settings
When the integration is initially set up, you will have the option to set which fields you want to code on Ramp to push over to your Accounting provider. These settings are always accessible and possible to change by going to the Accounting tab > Settings > Manage Accounting Fields. Below is an example for QuickBooks Online, however it is applicable to the other integrations.
Additionally, below is a GIF of how the accounting page looks once you connect. For specifics on each accounting integration, visit the provider specific pages at the bottom once you’ve read through some of the automations that we offer you to close your books in record time!
https://video.drift.com/v/abVyYjktbm8/
Deep Links
Once you sync a transaction or reimbursement over, on Ramp, you will have a link that will take you directly to the relevant transaction on your ERP. This is really helpful as you audit transactions or want to make sure if a transaction was synced since you will land directly on the synced transaction of the ERP. To find the link, click into the relevant transaction or reimbursement, and then select the "Open in ERP" at the top near the total price.
Below, you can see "Open in NetSuite" and the transaction it takes me too once I click on the underlined hyperlink. As you can see, this is the transaction I synced over from Ramp and I now have a direct link to it on Ramp.
Note: This is available for QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, Xero, and Sage Intacct.
Filtering and Renaming Fields
Since not all chart of accounts are relevant for credit card transactions, it is best practice to exclude some accounts from being visible on Ramp. On Ramp, you can filter visibility globally for all users, or at a more granular level per department.
Here's how:
- As an Admin or Bookkeeper, visit your Accounting settings: https://app.ramp.com/accounting/manage/transaction-fields/
- Click on "Manage Accounting Fields"
- Click on the "Filter and Rename" Icon as shown in the image below. You can access the filtering and renaming page for any accounting category we pull in from your accounting provider
- Toggle on/off the accounting options you want visible on the Ramp platform. Accounts that are toggled off will not appear in the category drop-downs on Ramp. If you'd like, you can toggle visibility at a more granular level per department.
Additionally, you can rename any accounting option on Ramp to make it more seamless for your team to find and code transactions. If you click on the rename icon next to the toggle, you can choose to rename an accounting option to another value. This will not affect values in your ERP. It is simply a display name on Ramp.
Sync
Once you have filled out all the required fields for a transaction or reimbursement, you will have the option to mark as ready. After marking as ready, the yellow sync button will appear as shown in the picture below.
Once you select “Sync”, you will be taken to a preview window as a final check before we sync over the transactions or reimbursements. Once you are ready, you can select “Sync to Accounting Provider” or download as a CSV. If you download as a CSV, you will have the option to download or download AND mark as synced. This will remove the transactions / reimbursements from the accounting page and is not recommended unless you are manually uploading that CSV file onto your accounting provider.
Once you select sync in this last screen, we will initiate the sync and it may take a couple of minutes for all the information to be passed through. If an error occurred, the message will let you know what went wrong to correct the issue and the transactions / reimbursements will remain in the accounting tab until they have been successfully synced over. Alternatively, you can reach out to our support team for more information as to why the sync failed (email support@ramp.com).
We will send across all the information you have coded within Ramp as well as the receipt and memo related to that transaction / reimbursement.
Post-sync and Reconciliation
To reconcile, you will have to go to your accounting provider to match the amount that was paid to Ramp from your bank account to the total dollar transaction amount synced over from Ramp. If you go to the Transactions tab within Ramp, you can filter by the statement period to easily check which transactions were included in which statement.