Hey everyone! I’m Adam – I’m the Product Lead for Ramp International, working hard to help support businesses operating around the world!
I’d love to learn more about your financial operations internationally. How do you manage payments and accounts for for subsidiaries operating in different countries with different currencies? What are your greatest challenges in terms of managing company finances across many currencies? Are there regions or countries where you face especially challenging operational hurdles? What are they?
We have Ramp for our US subsidiary and would love to move our Canadian subsidiary to also be using Ramp. My understanding is that there still isn’t the ability to connect to a Canadian bank account which is a requirement for us to be able to set that up. Is that on the roadmap for this year?
Yes, connecting a Canadian bank account to Ramp is on our roadmap for the first half of this year! In addition to bank-linking, we’ll also be rolling out the ability to issue Canadian cards to your team. If you’re interested, I’ll add you to our early access list for Canada and follow up with you directly when it’s time to onboard.
We would like to get our Canadian entity on Ramp as well. What we need:
Cards issued in CAD
Payments for those cards to be pulled from Canadian Bank account
GST/HST information to be extracted from receipts and stored in fields inside Ramp
Transaction Amount without GST/HST
GST/HST Amount
Transaction Amount with GST/HST
These fields need to be added to the CSV export. The GST/HST amount needs to go onto a separate GL account so that credits can be claimed back. Without this, we would not be able to recover the GST/HST via the ITC process which would be the equivalent of losing 11 % on every transaction.
Hey @alison! We are actually live today with CAD issuing and CAD card statement payments for customers on supported ERPs: NetSuite, Sage, Universal CSV.
It looks like your team is using Xero for an ERP. We don’t support international cards or payments on Ramp today for Xero (nor QBO), unfortunately. We may add international support for Xero toward the end of the year, but it’s not in our immediate plans because most of our multinational customers use one of the supported ERP setups above.
I hope that context is helpful. Would love to answer any follow-ups you may have.
Hey @RHOU! To provide some clarity on your requirements below:
Cards issued in CAD This is live today (on supported ERPs)
Payments for those cards to be pulled from Canadian Bank accounts This is also live today for CAD issuing customers in bucket #1 above. We’ll also be expanding support for CAD payments for additional customer cohorts (who do not use CAD issuing) in Q2.
GST/HST information to be extracted from receipts and stored in fields inside Ramp This is available on Ramp today for customers on NetSuite or Sage. Unfortunately our tax coding capabilities are not available on all ERPs today, though we intend to build out additional tax coding capabilities in the future.
Hope that context is helpful, and thank you so much for your time and questions!
Hi. Our main challenge with using Ramp for our Netherlands subsidiary is that currently everything from Ramp comes through in USD and has to be translated into Euros. There are a few knock-on effects from this. For context, we use Sage Intacct. First, in order for the Euro amount in the system to match the Euro amount on the receipt (important for any type of audit), we have to manually apply an exchange rate. Obviously, it is cumbersome to do this for every transaction in EUR. Second, only the EUR amounts show up in bank reconciliation since the home currency for that entity is EUR. This means that we have trouble matching transactions to the USD amounts shown on the Ramp statement. Third, we found out that in Intacct, credit card payoffs can only have one exchange rate per day or it creates multiple charge payoffs. Since we’re adjusting the exchange rate on almost every transaction, it means we may end up with 5 charge payoffs for 7 transactions. Fourth, in order to record the payments for the credit card charges in our NL entity, we have to do a workaround using a dummy bank account so that we can pay off the credit card in the NL entity and then use JEs to link the payment to the US entity where the bank it has been paid out of is located. Obviously, this was a lot more complexity than we anticipated when we started using Ramp for our NL entity.
Thank you for taking the time to chat through this live with me.
For others who may have similar questions, we are releasing the ability to choose whether to sync in the original currency of the transaction vs. the issuing currency of the transaction (behavior today) in April that should help address the first issue. Additionally, we are making an update to set the exchange rate in Sage such that its more accurate than what Sage’s daily rate would be to represent the transaction.
For points 3 and 4, unfortunately, this is a limitation of Sage that we cannot work around, however once we have international debiting live for those countries you listed, this work should be simplified.
We have offices in Europe as well and been interested in this.
Are the cards you have for NL EUR issued cards or USD issued cards? If they are USD issued then you are probably also paying foreign exchange fees of 3 % for each EUR transaction.