Ramp Rewind: Smarter spend controls, visibility, and efficiency

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of quarterly Ramp Rewind posts to get you up to speed on the latest product updates we’ve built.

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Time is money—the more time you spend on tedious tasks like fixing expense report errors, the less time you spend actually growing your business. Here’s what we’ve been building recently to help Ramp customers to work smarter and save more time and money. 

Best-in-class spend controls, down to the vendor level

To properly manage spend, finance teams need the ability to quickly issue cards with the right controls and specify which vendors employees can spend with. Google for paid ads?Yes. Starbucks for your daily caffeine kick? No.

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Ramp is the only corporate card that gives you granular merchant-level controls to block unapproved vendors from charging company cards. Blocking bad merchants on company cards is now as easy as blocking spam callers on your phone!

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In addition to daily, monthly, and annual card limits, you can also issue cards with weekly limits now, perfect for those employee lunch benefits.

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Our card programs let you roll out cards to your whole company with a single click. Create card templates for common benefits and activities like annual education stipends, home office setup, and team lunches. Got new team members joining? Speed up onboarding by specifying default cards that should be automatically issued to new team members.

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Visibility into the expenses that matter

You want to know about the $250k Salesforce spend before the receipt lands on your desk. Ramp admins can now create multi-step approval processes to route card and reimbursement requests based on spend amount and ensure the right folks are in the know. 

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If you live and breathe by your Slack notifications, use our integration to easily review and approve requests directly in Slack. You can also set it up to ping when important transactions happen. We’ve partnered with Slack to offer 25% off eligible plan upgrades (Ramp users, you can find this discount in the Insights tab).  

Admins can also set up fine-grained email alerts for transactions that exceed a certain dollar amount in different categories, merchants, or departments. Specify who should get alerted and create flag rules to automatically mark those transactions as being out of policy. 

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Ramp’s daily digest emails help admins stay on top of other important changes to company finances, such as:

• Large transactions
• Increases in vendor spend
• Upcoming bills
• New vendors
• New cards issued 

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Line managers need visibility as well. They now have better insight into how much their team is spending and opportunities to save within the platform.  

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Efficient accounting reconciliation

The easiest way to annoy your accounting team is to make them spend time correcting expense reports. Thankfully, Ramp admins can reduce errors by filtering the accounts that are visible by team. For instance, marketing teams should only see—you guessed it—marketing categories.

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Now admins can go one step further and relabel cryptic-sounding GL accounts in Ramp so employees can quickly find the right ones when submitting their reports. The less guesswork they do, the fewer errors you have to fix.  

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Use NetSuite? Our Built for NetSuite integration automatically codes transactions, syncs transactions across multiple entities, splits transactions, and more.

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If managers and finance teams spot an unauthorized transaction, they can directly flag it on the dashboard to trigger an alert to the employee. 

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Even more savings with Plastiq

With Ramp, you get 1.5% cashback on all transactions. For vendors who don't accept cards, use Plastiq to charge your Ramp card and send out payment via check, ACH, or wire transfer. That way, you can get cashback for big expenses like inventory, office leases, and logistics while preserving your cash reserves. Ramp users pay a discounted 2.5% fee for Plastiq vs the standard 2.85%. Learn more about our Plastiq partnership  

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Want to see if Ramp can help you with your spend management? Sign up for free. Want to join our mission to help businesses save more money? Check out our open roles