Ramp’s default check template leaves a lot to be desired, especially since custom templates aren’t available as an option at this time. The information provided and how it is displayed has resulted in vendors having difficulty applying our payments correctly, which puts extra work on us to contact them and sort it out.
I’ll list my suggested changes first and then clarify the reasoning for them/what issues they would address. Note that all of these are things that have caused vendors to misapply payments from us.
- Vendor memo field should display on the remittance in addition to the invoice number, not replace the invoice number.
- Batched payments should list the amount being paid for each invoice.
- Remit info should be consistent between batched vs unbatched payments
- The memo line in the upper-right box should be moved down to start where its current overflow position is.
1: Currently, the memo field replaces the invoice number, which is not in line with how most other payment systems behave, and that difference of expectation is not communicated to users. We discovered this by trial and error. In order to include both invoice # and account # on the check remittance, we have to copy the invoice # down into the vendor memo field, which is an unnecessary extra step.
2: The amount we’re paying won’t always match the amount the vendor thinks we should be paying, so a breakdown by invoice would help ensure payments are applied correctly. This is mainly important for batched payments, but I don’t see any issue with including it on unbatched payments as well.
3: Batched payments display only invoice number, unbatched display only vendor memo. The lack of consistency is frustrating and it means if a payment happens to get batched then we wasted our time on the vendor memo. Also, it seems like it’d be more complicated to have batched payments display different remit information than unbatched ones; having them show the same info - just in sequence - seems much simpler.
4: The way the memo line starts in the box in the top-right corner and then overflows to the middle of the page looks messy and can be difficult to make sense of, especially if it’s only just long enough to overflow.