July 28, 2021

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Even more savings with Plastiq

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

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

Try Ramp for free
Share with
TK KongHead of Ramp Procurement, Ramp
TK is the Head of Ramp Procurement. He previously co-founded Venue, a procurement startup backed by Sequoia Capital and later acquired by Ramp in 2023. Prior to founding Venue, he was employee #20 and the product lead for spend management at Ramp. He graduated from Cornell with a BS in Information Science, Systems and Technology.
Ramp is dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes make informed decisions. We adhere to strict editorial guidelines to ensure that our content meets and maintains our high standards.

When our teams need something, they usually need it right away. The more time we can save doing all those tedious tasks, the more time we can dedicate to supporting our student-athletes.

Sarah Harris

Secretary, The University of Tennessee Athletics Foundation, Inc.

How Tennessee built a championship-caliber back office with Ramp

Ramp had everything we were looking for, and even things we weren't looking for. The policy aspects, that's something I never even dreamed of that a purchasing card program could handle.

Doug Volesky

Director of Finance, City of Mount Vernon

City of Mount Vernon addresses budget constraints by blocking non-compliant spend, earning cash back with Ramp

Switching from Brex to Ramp wasn’t just a platform swap—it was a strategic upgrade that aligned with our mission to be agile, efficient, and financially savvy.

Lily Liu

CEO, Piñata

How Piñata halved its finance team’s workload after moving from Brex to Ramp

With Ramp, everything lives in one place. You can click into a vendor and see every transaction, invoice, and contract. That didn’t exist in Zip. It’s made approvals much faster because decision-makers aren’t chasing down information—they have it all at their fingertips.

Ryan Williams

Manager, Contract and Vendor Management, Advisor360°

How Advisor360° cut their intake-to-pay cycle by 50%

The ability to create flexible parameters, such as allowing bookings up to 25% above market rate, has been really good for us. Plus, having all the information within the same platform is really valuable.

Caroline Hill

Assistant Controller, Sana Benefits

How Sana Benefits improved control over T&E spend with Ramp Travel

More vendors are allowing for discounts now, because they’re seeing the quick payment. That started with Ramp—getting everyone paid on time. We’ll get a 1-2% discount for paying early. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars, it does add up.

James Hardy

CFO, SAM Construction Group

How SAM Construction Group LLC gained visibility and supported scale with Ramp Procurement

We’ve simplified our workflows while improving accuracy, and we are faster in closing with the help of automation. We could not have achieved this without the solutions Ramp brought to the table.

Kaustubh Khandelwal

VP of Finance, Poshmark

How Poshmark exceeded its free cash flow goals with Ramp

I was shocked at how easy it was to set up Ramp and get our end users to adopt it. Our prior procurement platform took six months to implement, and it was a lot of labor. Ramp was so easy it was almost scary.

Michael Natsch

Procurement Manager, AIRCO

“Here to stay:” How AIRCO consolidated procurement, AP, and spend to gain control with Ramp