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Migrating to an ERP Without a Direct Ramp Integration

Overview

Sometimes, a business will outgrow the accounting system it is currently using. Perhaps you are moving from a desktop product to a cloud product. Perhaps your business now consists of several businesses that require consolidated accounting. Or perhaps you are moving from a product that worked fine when you were a small business but is no longer suitable for your growing needs.

Ramp is designed to grow with your business, and you may want to switch your accounting software providers while keeping Ramp in place as your spend management solution. 

Here are our recommended steps for transitioning to a new accounting provider, with detailed explanations of each step below.

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Steps to switch

Step 1: Choose a transition date

  • When moving to a new system, most firms will keep and export financial statements from their old system and start fresh at the beginning of a new period in their new system. This’ll usually be timed around a month, quarter, half-year, or full-year end. 
  • You will perform a close on your transition date. Then, you’ll generate final financial statements for dates and periods up to that date on your old system. From that date forward, you will generate new financial statements in your new accounting provider.
  • Choose the date you will use to switch to your new system and give yourself enough time to prepare. Two or three months is not unreasonable.

Step 2: If you can, pay off any bills in Ramp prior to the transition date and wait on creating any further bills until after the transition.

  • Ramp syncs your bills with your accounting system when they are processed, but if you have a bill in your old system that remains unpaid when you switch to your new system, you’ll likely run into issues matching the bill payment with the original bill, which won’t be present on the new system. 
  • The easiest thing to do is to approve and pay all Ramp-managed bills prior to the transition date.  Once you’ve switched over to the new system, you can start entering, approving, and paying bills in Ramp again.  You may need to manage vendor expectations to handle this. 
  • If you have any outstanding bills that span the transition period, we offer steps for handling them in step 7 below, but to reduce your workload, you should minimize these as much as you can.

Step 3: Sync all of your card transactions to your old accounting system up until the transition date, and leave any transactions dated after the transition date as unsynced.

Within your old accounting system, you want to perform a close to get the final account values as of the transition date. Therefore, you should sync all expenses incurred up to the transition date over to your accounting system. You may need to wait a few days after the transition date for any uncleared card transactions that occurred in the previous period to clear. Once they’re cleared, sync everything up to that date and then hold off syncing anything else until the transition is done.

Step 4: Sync all of your approved reimbursements to your old accounting system up until the transition date, and leave any reimbursements dated after the transition date as unsynced.

As with cards, you want to sync across any reimbursements and repayments dated in the period prior to the transition date into the old accounting system before closing your books.

Step 5: Perform a final close on your old accounting system, generate trial balances, and import them into your new system

  • You are now done with your old accounting system! Make sure you have captured all your Ramp transactions for the pre-transition date in your old accounting system and that you have performed any other close tasks on your old accounting provider. You can then generate your final financial statements, and you can get ready to move to your new system. 
  • At this point, you should import trial balances into your accounting provider as of the date of the switchover so your accounts are correct in the new system.

Note: If you don’t have a lot of transaction history, it may be beneficial to transfer all of your historical transactions to the new system rather than importing trial balances. When you import trial balances, you lose the ability to generate financial statements that occur within or span a period prior to the transition date. The mechanics of importing all historical journals are too complex to fully cover here - it is worth contacting your new accounting provider to discuss which approach is right for you.

Step 6: Disconnect Ramp’s accounting integration

You can now disconnect your old accounting provider from Ramp under accounting settings. If you don’t use Ramp Bill Pay, or you have no outstanding approved or unpaid bills, you can skip step 7 and proceed to step 8.

Step 7: Backup and delete any approved and unpaid bills in Ramp, and create a suspense expense account in your new accounting provider

  • If you have processed, approved, or unpaid bills from Step 2, then you should export these as a backup from Ramp and then delete them from Ramp altogether.  Keep the backup, as we are going to recreate these bills in step 10.
  • Go to your new accounting provider. If you have imported a trial balance, you will have a credit sitting in your AP account equal to all outstanding bills. Take note of this amount.
  • You should also create a new expense account in your Chart of Accounts. This account is going to be a suspense account, and we will clear out the balance entirely at the end of this process, so just use a name you will understand.

Step 8: Connect your new provider and complete the accounting setup

In Ramp, you should now connect accounting to your new accounting provider. If you have an account manager, you can reach out to them to assist you with this. You should complete the accounting setup, indicating which A/P and Cash accounts Ramp should use for cards, reimbursements, and bills.

Note: When switching to a new accounting provider in Ramp, historical coding from your previous provider won't be visible in the interface. If necessary, you can regain visibility to this historical coding by reconnecting your original accounting provider. However, we strongly recommend backing up all historical data within your previous accounting system first.

Step 9: Review all vendors, rules, and card programs

Now that you have connected to your new accounting provider, any mappings in Ramp to accounting values will no longer be correct. You need to remap these fields to the right values in your new accounting system. Depending on how many vendors, programs, and card rules you have, this may take a while, but the good news is that it only needs to be done once, and it will give you confidence and assurance that data is being mapped to the correct values when you resume syncing data between Ramp and the new system.

Step 10: If you deleted any bills from Ramp as part of step 7, recreate them in Ramp, allocate them to your suspense expense account, and then create a manual journal to reverse this out.

  • If you did not delete any processed, approved, or unpaid bills in step 7, you can skip to step 11.
  • If you deleted processed, approved, or unpaid bills, it is now time to recreate them. Go to Ramp and enter the bills, but instead of allocating them to the expense account that was on the original bill, you should use the Suspense Expense Account. This is because the expense was already captured in the previously closed period in your old system.
  • Once you have recreated all of the bills in Ramp that you need to recreate, these should all be synced to your new system, but your A/P account will now equal the total of these bills plus the original A/P trial balance you imported.  We need to reverse this amount.  You can take a look at the debit value of the suspense account, and you should create a manual journal entry to do this reversal to bring the suspense account to 0.

Manual Journal

  • Dr Accounts Payable (no Vendor) (full value of Suspense Expense account)
  • Cr Suspense Expense Account (full value of the account)

Once this step is done, you should check the value of accounts payable. It should be equal to the A/P balance you noted down in Step 7.

Your A/P balance should now be correct, and its total should be equal to the sum of all outstanding bills allocated to the correct vendors.

Step 11: Resume syncing card transactions and reimbursements, and start approving and paying bills!

You’re all done! Any card transactions or reimbursements dated in the new period can now be synced across to the new system.  Approving a bill will create it in the new system, and paying the bill in Ramp will record that bill as paid.

Congratulations! With a little preparation, transitioning Ramp to use a new accounting provider is relatively painless. As always, please reach out to our friendly support team if you have any questions or concerns.

Troubleshooting sync issues

If you encounter a sync issue when syncing to your new accounting provider, the problem is most likely because you are trying to sync using field values that map to the old provider. Reselect these values, even if they look correct, and try the sync again.

 

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