Hi all! I am a finance manager at a nonprofit and most of the approval/policy steps we have in place for our Ramp expenses are “after the fact”. Example, approving a meal after it has already been charged to an employee’s Ramp card or approving payment on a vendor invoice after the vendor has been contracted. We want our company expense policies to be reflected in Ramp as much as possible. We are considering implementing Ramp travel (and related Ramp travel policies) and additional policies around procurement to ensure employees are meeting government grant contracting and spending policies, prior to the expense actually incurring. Interested in any tips/tricks/features you all would recommend specifically for nonprofits helping employees comply with government grants via Ramp features. Thanks!
I’m the controller for a nonprofit in Downtown LA, and we are just starting to bring more of our operations onto Ramp. I would also love to hear any tips/tricks out there.
Thank you!
Hello!
We have a similar issue, even though we use an external procurement system with Sage Intacct. Prior to that we used Procurify, and before that we were on a paper PO system.
Sage Intacct is the closest we’ve gotten to a straight-line from request-to-spend to matching credit card expenses to the request is in Sage Intacct Purchasing, but only explore this option if you’re looking for Cadillac-accounting systems (I have my complaints but we locked in to Sage long before me my taking my position, and it’s worked in our favor in terms of functionality).
If you are using a system without a built-in procurement, Procurify worked well enough for our purposes before. This is still adding another system, which is ideally avoided.
I’ve looked into the Ramp+ procurement and it doesn’t really work for our purposes, but I, like the two of you, am very interested in others’ approaches.
Ramp is consistently always getting better, so I wouldn’t put it past them to implement a better more robust system in the future.
Hi @Jake_Folsom, @Andrew_Johnson , @Julia_Mazzola – please keep using this thread as it’s great for other customers to see – but I want to share that I’ve created a “Nonprofit Group” within the forum! I just added you three to it.
Click the three lines beside your icon in the top right → “Groups” → find the Nonpfrofit group.
Hopefully, this group can be a place to share Nonprofit-specific best practices & questions.
Best,
Charlotte
Hi @charlotte!
We are also a nonprofit, and we would like to be added to the “Nonprofit Group” to collaborate and learn about best practices as we are new to Ramp and rolling out the system.
Thanks,
Lyndi
Done! 
@Lyndi_Porch
For anyone else wanting to explore groups, check them out here 
Hi Julia. Nonprofit using Ramp. (for reference last 12 months we did 675 transactions on ramp and 183k in spend). We also do approvals “after the fact”. But here are some things that I’ve found helps:
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First just want to flat out state, RAMP has saved us 20+ hours a month in receipt gathering, in matching expenses to our programs, expenses to grants, etc. So nice to just download the receipts I need for a grant in one easy package.
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We implement a MANY card policy - where if I know our Marketing employee is authorized to spend X amount a month on facebook - I make a card with that exact limit! That way I know they are not going over that budget each month without it first being charged and then going into qb and realizing its over. Do the same for a specific grant - this way it’s really easy to run the reports and download the receipts for that particular grant - and I know it’s not going over budget.
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I have just started to experiment with the shared expense cards that RAMP recently implemented. My goal is to have a budget, then have multiple people each have cards where the total limit for the group of cards is the budget. The only problem is that some expenses are paid by check, so I would have to adjust the card limit as that was happening. (I haven’t switched to check payment in RAMP yet - still doing those old school).
So far, since we have been using the cards, we have only had 2 or 3 charges that I could not approve (someone used a ramp card for doordash for a business event, and then never took it out when using it for thier personal orders). It was easy to just take that out of the employees salary in the next payroll (as I haven’t yet implemented the feature in ramp to get it paid back that way)