All the ways Ramp helps you speed up your close

Here’s a scary stat just in time for Halloween: 72% of organizations rank closing the books as the #1 most time-consuming task for finance teams. We recently hosted a webinar showing how powerful new capabilities in Ramp can speed up this work and eliminate tedious steps for accountants.

During the session, Dan Luthi from Ignite Spot, an accounting firm that provides bookkeeping and virtual CFO services, shared how businesses can automate their financial processes end-to-end for maximum efficiency.

Watch the replay or check out this recap if you weren’t able to join.

What we covered

Create custom views to match your month-end workflow

Categorizing expenses, reminding employees about missing receipts, syncing transactions to your accounting system—these are steps you go through every month to close the books. Now you can set up and save custom views in Ramp to help you breeze through this work.

Dan notes, “There are so many times, especially for a large business, that you need to be able to quickly look at one specific person or department. Not having to create those views on a regular basis cuts down on a huge amount of time.”

Upload Ramp data directly into your ERP with custom CSV exports

You no longer need Excel as a go-between for your Ramp CSV export and ERP import. Now you can customize your CSV export to match your ERP fields exactly. Specify which columns to show or hide, reorder and rename columns, hard-code fields, and more.

Reconcile with 100% accuracy

Goodbye, data discrepancies. We built a new reconciliation tool to help you verify that the data in Ramp matches what is in your ERP exactly. Typically, fixing discrepancies requires a lot of manual work. But now, Ramp can show you if unsynced transactions and miscategorized expenses in your ERP are the reason behind balance mismatches.

Dan explains reconciliation gets especially tricky when credit card statements come in the middle of the month. He says, “What I love about the tool is that it's focused on month end. Accountants can rely on it to ensure that as of the end of the period, all of their information is going to be tied very clearly. You can have more confidence in the way that information is bouncing back and forth between systems.”

This tool is now available in beta for QuickBooks customers and coming in Q1 for NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and Xero. To join the beta program, go to Company Settings > Ramp Beta. Then visit the Accounting tab and click the three-dots menu on the top right to find the tool.

Month-end best practices from Dan Luthi

As Ignite Spot’s COO, Dan has spent the last 15 years helping small to mid-sized businesses optimize their financial processes to drive better insights and decision-making. Throughout the webinar, he shared great advice, including the following:

• Make it easy for employees to submit expenses in real time: Ramp's SMS reminders help employees submit receipts and memos while they’re on the go. Suggested memos based on Google Calendar events and past transactions speed things up even more.
• Automatically collect receipts from employees’ inboxes and apps. To save employees even more time, integrate Ramp with tools like Gmail, Amazon Business, and Uber. Ramp automatically collects, verifies, and matches receipts to transactions.
• Automate vendor, department, and category-specific coding. By using coding rules, you eliminate human error and free up your team's time for more important work.

Close your books faster with Ramp Stack

Month-end close still means toggling between spreadsheets, chasing receipts, and manually reconciling transactions across systems. Too much of the close depends on repetitive work that leaves no time for client advisory.

With Ramp Stack, you'll run every step of the close in one place for your QuickBooks-based clients. Agents learn your firm's processes and execute them alongside your team, with full transparency into every decision. You stay in control while agents handle the repetitive work:

• Code transactions with confidence: You'll get automatic coding that applies your firm's logic and sharpens over time. Agents flag anything uncertain, and nothing posts to the GL without your sign-off.
• Run a continuous close: Agents match your books to QuickBooks data daily, so close compresses from weeks to days. They'll surface every discrepancy for your review before anything posts.
• Manage every client's close from one checklist: You'll track every task, assignee, and deadline in a centralized dashboard so every item has an owner
• Turn your processes into reusable skills: Codify firm-specific workflows as skills that agents follow consistently across every client
• See the reasoning behind every decision: Agents format every output like a workpaper, showing the logic behind each recommendation. Nothing hits the general ledger without your sign-off.

Try Stack for free to see why 4,500+ accounting firms, including 92 of the top 100 CPA firms, choose to partner with Ramp.