Ramp Roundup: Q3 2024 product releases

The short version

Vendor invoices arrive at month-end with unit prices that have crept up, quantities that don't match what you received, and line items no one remembers ordering. Your team catches some of the discrepancies and waves the rest through because close week doesn't wait. That drift is invisible on any single invoice and material across a year.

Ramp's automated three-way match has caught more than 3,000 invoice errors and prevented $50 million in overbilled payments across customers. Here's how the workflow runs and how you can put it to work.

Most useful for: AP managers, controllers, and finance leaders who process enough invoices that manual matching slows down close and want preapprovals, item receipts, and invoice matching in one system.

Top 5 takeaways from the session

1. Ramp has blocked $50M in overbilled payments

Since launch, Ramp's automated three-way match has caught more than 3,000 invoice errors and blocked $50 million in overbilled payments. This is the routine billing drift that happens at scale where a unit price creeps up, a quantity doesn't match the receipt, or a line item appears that no one ordered.

2. Most AP teams are stuck in one of 2 broken setups

Most AP teams fall into one of two broken patterns. The first is no preapproval process at all, which means surprise invoices and reimbursements hit 30 days after the spend already happened, often out of policy or out of budget. The second is what Chris described as a "Frankenstein process by piecing together all these different things that don't quite integrate," stitched from Google Forms, Excel, Jira, or a separate PO generator.

Both setups produce the same outcome where you can't validate invoices against what was actually ordered and received.

3. Receiving against a PO now happens natively in Ramp for NetSuite

Earlier in the year, Ramp's three-way match required pulling POs and item receipts from NetSuite. That capability still exists for NetSuite power users, but now everything can happen natively inside Ramp. You can record full or partial receipts directly against an open PO, and because line items and PO status update automatically, the system is ready to match against an inbound invoice without a manual data transfer step.

4. Overbilling protection turns a yellow flag into a hard block

A passive warning isn't a control. You can configure overbilling thresholds by percentage or dollar amount.

"With overbilling protection, we can set parameters in which a percent or dollar amount threshold that will effectively block us from creating these bills if it is outside of these thresholds."

When an uploaded invoice exceeds those thresholds, Ramp converts the warning into a red blocker that prevents the bill from being created until the vendor issues a corrected invoice.

5. Procurement is included in Ramp Plus

"If you're on Plus, test it out. It's part of your Plus package. You can build an intake form in a matter of seconds, in a matter of minutes. If you're not on Plus, you can also try procurement for free for thirty days."

If you're running Coupa or Zip today, Ramp has duplicated existing approval workflows and migrated customers in a matter of weeks, though you should confirm specifics with your account team before planning a migration.

Why is manual invoice matching still eating your close week?

P2P software earned its bad reputation honestly. Legacy tools are:

"Very expensive ... [with] difficult, long, drawn-out implementation timelines, and the legacy UIs are known to be confusing and quite complex."

That avoidance has a cost, and it shows up at month-end as surprise invoices, duplicate vendors, and auto-renewing contracts buried in vendor agreements that no one's tracking.

The way out isn't another bolt-on tool. It's one system where the intake form, the purchase order, the item receipt, the invoice, and the payment all live together, with the activity log running underneath. When all five live in the same place, three-way matching stops being a separate project and becomes a default behavior.

That shift is what Ramp shipped this quarter.

"Since we launched procurement earlier in the year, we shipped over 20 major platform upgrades like a contract renewals dashboard, overbilling protection, and we also embedded AI directly into our intake form. Hundreds of businesses close to a thousand at this point have already onboarded."

The volume number matters less than the fact that it's now governed by a single workflow, which is what makes the matching automation possible in the first place.

The technique behind automated three-way match

Automated three-way matching works because every step lives in one system. The sequence looks like this:

1. You submit a purchase request through Ramp's intake form. Just drop in a screenshot, quote, or contract, and Ramp fills out the rest
2. The request goes through approval and becomes a purchase order. All documents, activity, and line items are visible in one view on the PO page
3. When goods or services arrive, you record an item receipt directly against the PO. Receipts can be full or partial, line item by line item. PO status updates automatically
4. When the vendor invoice arrives, you upload the PDF to the PO. Ramp's OCR auto-creates a draft bill, pulling line items, quantities, and unit prices into the bill for you
5. Ramp matches the bill against the PO and the item receipt. Any discrepancy in unit price, quantity, or totals gets flagged inline on the bill

With overbilling protection turned on, a flagged discrepancy beyond your configured threshold blocks bill creation entirely until a corrected invoice arrives.

This works because the PO, the receipt, and the bill share the same line-item structure inside the same system. There's no export, no reconciliation, and no manual comparison. The match is a side effect of the data already being in one place.

A lower-lift first step is to turn on overbilling protection on an existing PO workflow and set a conservative percentage threshold. You'll see the flags before you commit to the blocks.

Receiving against a PO: What changed this quarter

The problem this solves. Before this release, if you used Ramp for procurement, you still had to track item receipts in a separate place and then return to Ramp to reconcile. That round-trip is exactly the gap where overbilled invoices slip through, because if the receipt lives somewhere your invoice tool can't see, the match can't run automatically.

The build. Ramp added native receiving directly on the PO. From the PO view, you click the receive button, name the receipt, and record what arrived. Partial receipts are supported line by line, and the PO status and line-item statuses update automatically once the receipt is created.

As Matt described the redesigned PO page:

"On the right hand side of your screen, this is where you're gonna see all documents and associated activity. Just as I did with the reporting and workflows that we had in the previous demonstration, the activity log is a great field audit trail for all changes that have happened inside of the procurement process."

The demo. Matt fully received against an open PO for office supplies, then uploaded the vendor invoice as a PDF. As he described what happens next:

"When this invoice gets uploaded into my purchase order, a draft bill is automatically created behind the scenes for me to get ready and roll into."

He didn't type a single line item, and the bill was ready to review, with units received, units billed, and unit prices all displayed side by side against the PO.

Overbilling protection: Yellow flag to red block

The problem this solves. A flagged discrepancy is only useful if someone catches it, and during a heavy close, you're moving fast. A yellow warning on a single bill is easy to miss when you're processing hundreds in a day. The cost of missing it scales with invoice volume.

The build. Inside PO and bill settings, you configure overbilling thresholds by either a percentage variance from the PO unit price or a dollar amount. Below the threshold, Ramp surfaces a warning flag on the draft bill. At or above the threshold, the warning escalates to a hard block.

"When I turn on overbilling protection, the system automatically updates to a red blocker, restricting me from moving any farther in this bill creation process until we get a corrected invoice from our vendor."

The demo. In Matt's example, the invoice unit price was about 10% higher than the PO unit price. With overbilling protection off, Ramp showed a yellow flag and let the bill move forward. With overbilling protection on, the same scenario produced a red blocker that prevented bill creation entirely.

"So maybe for one particular purchase order, right, not a big deal. Pennies, easy to find. But as you're going over tens and hundreds or thousands of these invoices, a tool like this can save your business a ton of money."

Final thoughts

Ramp has already caught $50 million in overbilled payments, but the number matters less than the shape of the control. A warning that depends on a human catching it during close isn't a control. A threshold that blocks bill creation is.

You'll get the most out of this release if you make matching the default, not a separate review step.

Turn on the threshold.

See how Ramp fits in

If you're reconciling POs, item receipts, and invoices across three different systems, the leak isn't your team. It's the gap between the tools. Ramp puts your POs, receipts, invoices, and payments in one workflow, which is what makes automated three-way matching and overbilling protection work.