Best practices I learned from Customer Education that I’ve taken to clients as a Customer Success Manager at Ramp 💳

[jstent (Jessy Stent)]

Hi all, I started my journey at Ramp in May 2022 focusing on enabling customers with best practices at scale in Customer Education. In late 2023, I realized I missed working 1:1 with customers and transitioned back into a CSM role at Ramp. Throughout my Ramp tenure, I had many key learnings about the best way to implement Ramp and scale it throughout your team that still ring true today.

Here are a few tips and tricks

1. Implement controls leveraging out-of-policy criteria, merchant blocking, and global approvals → ensures that every card and cardholder is aligned with your team’s internal policy & removes the chance for human error. I always say “Let Ramp be the bad guy for your company spend” which is evident when Ramp is automatically flagging transactions that do not align with your internal policies.

2. Identify a pilot group to help pressure test your Ramp setup as soon as you complete the application. This allows you to identify where you may need to add or remove additional guardrails to ensure Ramp is working seamlessly for your team.

3. Issue physical cards to every single user you invite to Ramp → If any team members were previously using reimbursements, you can still issue a physical card to them but set the limit to $0.
   This helps to ensure that Ramp’s out-of-policy automation is notifying you of spend that doesn’t align with your policy versus relying on managers/the admin team to catch it when reviewing reimbursements.

4. Assign vendor-specific virtual cards for any vendors you are consistently paying large amounts to. This allows you to apply card-level coding to all transactions on this card, assign merchant and/or category restrictions, and ensure your company money is always safe even if the card information is compromised.

5. Create Spend Programs for any spend you are issuing/allowing users to request at a large scale. This ensures each card has the same controls and allows you to make changes in bulk. This is helpful for everything from benefits like wellness or WFH stipends to employees traveling to meet clients or head to team offsites.

6. Limit which fields cardholders can see when coding transactions in the Accounting tab. This will save you from needing to answer questions for any cardholder coding transactions and ensure employees are coding to the right fields.

7. Turn on our receipt capture integrations, such as Gmail/Outlook, to obtain transaction requirements on time. Learn more here

Have any questions or best practices to share? Comment below, I’d love to chat!

[Kath_Mullholand]

@jstent

Issue physical cards to every single user you invite to Ramp → If any team members were previously using reimbursements, you can still issue a physical card to them but set the limit to $0.
This helps to ensure that Ramp’s out-of-policy automation is notifying you of spend that doesn’t align with your policy versus relying on managers/the admin team to catch it when reviewing reimbursements.

I don’t understand how the physical card changes the automation.

[jstent (Jessy Stent)]

@Kath_Mullholand

I don’t understand how the physical card changes the automation.

Hi Kath!

Ramp’s out-of-policy functionality will automatically flag transactions made on a user’s Ramp card that go against your internal policies whereas if the user is submitting a reimbursement, this will need to be manually reviewed by a team member as in policy. Let me know if you have any further questions on this!