Procurement Implementation Best Practices Guide

Overview

This guide is designed to help you plan for a successful Ramp Procurement implementation. It provides best practices, intake questions to consider, and a framework for organizing your project.

Important: This guide is focused on sharing our implementation knowledge and best practices so your team can effectively plan and execute your project. It is not intended to outline Ramp's specific involvement or resource commitments during implementation — your account team will align with you separately on that. Our goal here is to equip you with the insights we've gained from successful implementations so you can build a strong plan on your end.

Key insight: Two questions alone will reveal 80% of your implementation complexity: "Tell me all the tools involved in your current process" and "Tell me all the people involved." The answers help you anticipate challenges, identify integration needs, and properly scope the project.

Section 1: procurement intake assessment

Before beginning implementation, answer the following questions to help scope your project. The more detail you provide upfront, the smoother your implementation will be.

1.1 evaluation context and stakeholder priorities

Understand why you're making this change and what each team needs from the new solution.

• What is the primary motivation for this evaluation?
  • What triggered the decision to look at procurement solutions now?
• What does each stakeholder group care most about?

• For each stakeholder group:
  • What is working well today with your current process?
  • What is something you'd really like to see improved?
  • Are there elements of your current process that you like and would want to make sure a new solution has?
• Do you have a good understanding of where your process breaks down or what could slow it down?
• What is your full stack of tools you are using today?
  • List all software tools and communication channels (email, Slack, etc.) involved in procurement, approvals, and payments.

1.2 spend categories

Understand what you're buying and at what scale.

• What are you primarily buying?
  • What does the breakdown look like by category? (e.g., software, services, material goods)
• How many purchase requests and bills do you process?
  • Estimate monthly and annual volumes.
• How many total vendors do you have?
• Do you want to create multiple Spend Programs in Ramp that different people can access, or everything in a single unified program (most customers choose this)?

1.3 process deep-dives

Walk through each area of your Procure-to-Pay process in detail. For your main spend category (e.g., software), answer these questions:

Purchase requests and purchase orders

If I worked at your company, how would I buy [your main spend category]?

• Purchase request submission:
  • Who submits purchase requests and how?
  • What information are you collecting from requestors?
  • Do requestors also code accounting information (ERP fields), or does that happen elsewhere?
• Purchase request approval:
  • Who is involved in approving requests? How is it determined who should approve?
  • What different teams are involved? (Legal, financial planning and analysis (FP&A), Security, IT)
  • How many total individuals could be involved in approving a request?
  • How often are changes made mid-request? What does that do to approvals?
  • What actions are happening in other systems during approval? (Legal via email, security reviews, etc.)
• Purchase order (PO) creation:
  • Do POs sync to your accounting system or AP system today?
  • Where do POs live once created? Where do they get synced?
  • What happens before the PO gets synced to the ERP or sent to the vendor?
  • How often are changes made to the PO after the fact?
• Are people pretty good about following this process? Where are the gaps?

Accounts payable and Bill Pay

• Bill creation and PO matching:
  • When invoices come in against POs, who processes them?
  • When matching POs to invoices to see discrepancies, how does that process work?
  • How often do you get invoices you don't recognize? What do you do when this happens?
• Bill coding and routing:
  • Does AP code every bill or route to others to code?
  • If AP is coding, how often are they guessing?
  • How often are bills routed to the wrong reviewer?
• AP approvals:
  • Who reviews and approves bills?
  • Does AP always know who should review what?
  • Are people forwarding invoices and having to re-approve them?
  • What pre-approvals on the purchase side affect bill approvals?
• Bill payment:
  • Have you ever paid something that shouldn't have been paid? How often and why?
  • Do you have delayed payments? Why are they getting delayed?

Vendor management

• How often do you onboard new vendors? What does that process look like?
• If someone requests to purchase from a new vendor, what additional steps are required?
• What information do you collect from vendors and when in the process?
  • Do you want to collect that information further upstream (at request time)?
• How are you handling ongoing vendor management?

Contract management and renewals

• How are you handling contract management today?
• How are you handling renewals?
  • How do you track upcoming renewals? Who is responsible for renegotiating?

Reporting

• What kind of reporting can't you do today that you wish you could do?
• What reports do you pull today that you definitely need to maintain?

Price intelligence and seat intelligence

• Do you have visibility into pricing benchmarks for your software purchases?
• How do you track software license utilization and seat counts?
• Is optimizing software spend a priority for this evaluation?

1.4 cutover planning

Plan for transitioning from your current system to Ramp.

• What is your cutover plan? How are you planning on approaching the transition?
• Will you need to bring over old purchase orders from your previous system?
  • Which purchase orders will you need to migrate?
• What vendor data will need to be migrated?

Section 2: project plan framework

Organize your implementation into workstreams with clear ownership. Each workstream should have a designated owner — a directly responsible individual (DRI) — responsible for coordinating testing and sign-off.

Your role in planning: The workstream DRI reviews the intake assessment and determines which test cases are relevant to your business. They assign due dates for when each item will be completed. This ownership model ensures accountability and keeps the project on track.

Workstream overview

Key responsibility division: Integration setup and technical testing is owned by ERP/IT. Validation that integrations functionally work for the process is owned by Procurement.

2.1 procurement workstream

Key milestones:

1. Build your first Spend Program — define request types, required fields, and routing rules.
2. Complete an end-to-end request test — submit, approve, and fulfill through the full workflow.
3. Create and sync a PO to your ERP — (if applicable) verify PO data flows correctly.
4. Test vendor onboarding — test for both existing vendors and new vendors.

Recommendation: Most companies find it easier to start with a single, unified procurement program that uses conditional questions to route different request types appropriately. You can always break this out into multiple specialized programs later as your processes mature. Starting simple reduces complexity and accelerates time to value.

For detailed setup instructions, see Getting started with Procurement.

2.2 ERP/IT workstream

Key milestones:

1. Set up integrations — connect Ramp to your ERP and required systems.
2. Test PO sync to ERP — verify purchase orders flow correctly.
3. Test bill sync — confirm invoices and payments sync properly.
4. Test vendor sync — validate vendor data flows between systems.

2.3 Bill Pay workstream

Key milestones:

1. Create and pay a bill without a PO — test basic Bill Pay workflow.
2. Create and pay a bill with a PO — test PO-backed invoice processing.
3. Test invoice matching — verify 2-way and 3-way matching as applicable.
4. Configure AP approval workflows — ensure proper routing and approvals.

For setup instructions, see Bill Pay setup. For details on creating invoices, see Creating draft bills on Bill Pay. For approval configuration, see Bill Pay approvals.

2.4 cutover and go-live workstream

Key milestones:

1. Develop vendor migration plan — identify which vendors need to be migrated.
2. Develop PO migration plan — determine which historical POs to bring over.
3. Execute data migrations — import vendors and POs according to plan.
4. Create go-live checklist — coordinate phased rollout if applicable.

Recommendation: For vendor migration, we recommend importing vendors via comma-separated value (CSV) file rather than syncing directly from your ERP. This gives you greater control over which vendors are brought into Ramp and allows you to clean up your vendor data during the migration process. Syncing directly from the ERP can result in importing vendors you don't actively use, creating unnecessary noise in your system.

Best practice: The same person should own both cutover planning and go-live planning. Cutover primarily involves two data types: vendors and purchase orders. This DRI is also responsible for creating the go-live checklist.

2.5 demo vs. production testing

Use a demo environment for initial testing when you have:

• Over 5,000 vendors or 5,000 historical purchase orders
• Multiple external integrations to test (Ironclad, Jira, Asana, etc.)
• Large CSV uploads of vendor data
• Complex data migrations from legacy systems

For most implementations, testing directly in production is appropriate and recommended.

Section 3: implementation timeline

A typical procurement implementation takes approximately 14 weeks. Adjust based on your organization's complexity.

Section 4: sign-off and go-live readiness

Admin configuration sign-off (week 9)

The core project team (workstream DRIs) conducts a comprehensive sign-off to validate all configurations are complete. This covers every item across all workstreams.

Cross-functional alignment (week 11)

Hold a meeting with stakeholders not involved in day-to-day implementation. This ensures broader buy-in and surfaces concerns before rollout.

Production Admin testing

Test an actual request all the way through to payment before go-live. This validates the end-to-end process and prepares admins to train end users.

End user training

Frame training around essential tasks end users need to perform. To prepare:

• Test all workflows end-to-end as an admin during production testing.
• Become comfortable demoing workflows to your team.
• Define end user competencies to be developed.
• Set up a dedicated internal channel for questions.

Share with end users: How to submit procurement requests.

Best practice: Your production testing is your opportunity to prepare for training. By testing all flows as an admin, you become comfortable demoing them. This hands-on experience is invaluable for effective training delivery.

Go-live checklist

Before going live:

• All workstream milestones tested and signed off
• Vendor data migrated (if applicable)
• Historical POs imported (if applicable)
• Cross-functional stakeholders approved configuration
• End users trained
• Internal support channel established

Post-go-live support

Set up a dedicated internal channel for end user questions. Admins provide first-line support, with Ramp available for high-priority issues and escalations.

Remember: This guide provides a framework, but you are the expert on your organization. Use your intake assessment to determine which test cases are relevant, then assign due dates and owners. The more preparation upfront, the smoother your go-live.