August 29, 2023

The top 4 controls that modern finance teams are using to control spend

Employee overspending and fraudulent practices are costing businesses valuable time and money. Expense reimbursement fraud makes up 11% of all fraud cases, with a median loss of $40k. 29% of all fraud cases are due to a lack of internal controls.

A focus on modernizing tech stacks via finance automation to gain greater operational efficiency and control over employee spend can not only prevent fraud, but help teams drive growth and achieve greater profitability. In fact, our data study shows that businesses have seen a positive ROI from distributing corporate credit cards with spend controls to employees versus relying on traditional corporate cards (56% vs 40%). They are 10% less likely to say they find it difficult to manage and enforce employee expense policy compliance.

We took a deep-dive into the top controls used by our mid-market customers over the past year, defined as 100-1000 FTE, to see exactly how growing companies are utilizing technology to encourage better spend controls, decrease busy work, and meet their potential.

How mid-market modern teams are controlling spend in real time

Mid-market finance teams are harnessing the power of advanced card controls to support more spend oversight. Examples of these controls include customizable approval trails, point of sale restrictions, and employee auto-notifications for out-of-policy spend.

At Ramp, our customers are relying on the following capabilities to reduce wasted spend:


1. Spend controls

When issuing a Ramp virtual or physical card, admins can select both a limit amount and frequency, e.g., non-recurring limits for one-time spend such as a home office stipend, or recurring (daily, monthly or yearly) limits for items like SaaS spend. They can also decide which spend categories are allowed or blocked across 40+ categories.

The total declined amount due to spend controls over the past year came out to over $770M.


And with blocked transactions, admins can set a maximum amount per transaction; charges over that amount will be declined.

2. Alerts

Admins can establish spend guidelines to determine what’s allowed to be purchased with a card. Alerts can be sent to specific employees to increase visibility, e.g., an alert sent whenever a home office purchase exceeds $500. Flags can also be sent for out-of-policy transactions, e.g., an email sent to both the cardholder and their manager when the cardholder


On average per business, Ramp auto-flagged or alerted 178 transactions over the past year.

3. Auto-lock

With auto-lock, finance teams can automatically lock cards if employees don’t submit the required receipt or materials after a set period of time. Admins can select a future date when a card will stop accepting transactions, which can be helpful in use cases like monthly software trials or week-long business trips.

Ramp locked an average of 21 cards per business. Cards locked due to missing items over the past year came out to 57. Overall, approximately 15% of cards were locked at least once during the year.

4. Employee repayments

Ramp repayments facilitate employee payback of out-of-policy transactions on their corporate card. Admins/managers can easily request repayment and employees can securely add their bank account information to make payment.

This amounted to a total of $1,579,394 in reimbursements overall.

Top controls used by mid-market Ramp customers

While all businesses on Ramp have memo and receipt requirements, 85% also enforce spend limit amounts to cap individual employee spend.

Over a third of mid-market businesses (36%) auto-lock cards due to missing items and 31% have vendor restrictions. Almost a quarter of these finance teams (24%) rely on transaction amount limits to put a ceiling on purchases, 23% use transaction flags, and 22% use card auto-lock dates. Lastly, 20% of mid-market finance teams control travel spend via flight budgets.

How Ramp helped Barry's increase spend compliance

Barry’s legacy finance and accounting systems were impeding the finance team’s ability to focus on strategic initiatives. Their finance team decided to onboard Ramp to automate its expense management.

Ramp cards allowed managers to set their own card rules, create vendor-specific virtual cards, and automatically enforce spend limits. Barry’s saved employees 400 hours spent on expense reports per month. Ramp and Barry’s together enabled employees to engage in more meaningful work, freed up more bandwidth on the accounting team, and increased spend compliance.

See how Ramp can help you proactively control spend

With advanced card functionality, successful mid-market finance teams can proactively rein in out-of-policy spend, save valuable time, and achieve greater operational efficiency. Sign up for Ramp today to see how advanced controls can help your business.

Try Ramp for free
Share with
Stefanie GordonFormer Sr. Content Marketing Manager, Ramp
Prior to Ramp, Stefanie worked as a finance reporter at Institutional Investor, where she covered everything from options to pension funds. She graduated from the University of Delaware with a degree in English and a concentration in journalism and later earned an MA in education from NYU. When she isn't immersed in content and thought leadership, Stefanie loves to play any and all racquet sports.
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