I love Ramp and have used it at two companies now — I think it’s the best out there. However, at my new company, we have a more nuanced, multi-site business that doesn’t fit as cleanly into the Ramp experience.
We operate with a centralized support team (accounting, finance, HR, operations, etc.) that supports multiple practices — each its own legal entity and its own subsidiary in NetSuite, our ERP. Trying to build workflows in Ramp has been challenging because our centralized accounting team processes most recurring charges and submits bills, then tags them out to each location as appropriate.
Here are the challenges we’ve encountered in Ramp:
Bill Pay - Ideally, we want a Location Owner for each separate entity/practice (typically an Office Manager) who:
- Is the first approver for all bills
- Has visibility into all spend at their location — regardless of whether they are the cardholder or direct approver
But that hasn’t been easy in Ramp due to a few constraints:
- Ramp currently assigns Location and Department Owner based on the vendor owner, which in our case is almost always a member of the centralized accounting team (since vendors are shared across practices).
- This makes it hard to build Office Managers directly into workflows as true Location Owners.
As a workaround, we’ve been:
- Creating custom groups for each location
- Adding the Office Manager to the group
- Building a rule that routes any bill assigned to Entity A to Office Manager Group A
This works, but it’s manual and not scalable as we grow.
We also want Office Managers to see all bills at their location — even if they don’t approve them (e.g., rent or insurance). Adding them as an AP Clerk allows for visibility, but gives them more permissions than we’d like for internal controls (they could edit or submit bills, which we don’t want).
To add another layer, we have Regional Managers who oversee multiple sites. Ideally, they should:
- See all bills across their assigned locations
- Only approve bills selectively, based on rules (e.g., dollar thresholds)
That level of granular control and visibility is hard to achieve with Ramp’s current role structure.
Credit Cards We currently issue one physical card per location, plus virtual cards for recurring charges.
In many cases for the recurring charges, the centralized accounting team:
- Manages the vendor relationship
- Receives and uploads the receipts
Ideally, we’d assign the card owner role to the accounting team member (so they get the reminders for receipts and memos). But we can’t, because that team sits at the support entity, not the practice-level entity — and Ramp doesn’t allow the card owner to be in a different entity than the card. Instead, we assign virtual cards to the Office Manager — but this causes confusion because they’re getting notifications to upload receipts even though they weren’t involved in the transaction.
As a result, we’d love the ability to:
- Assign a card owner from a different entity than the card
- Show the Location Owner all card spend for their practice, regardless of who the cardholder is
I know our multi-entity setup is complex — each location is a separate legal entity and NetSuite subsidiary — but I’m confident we’re not alone in this setup. I would imagine there are many other companies using Ramp with centralized accounting teams who process and pay bills, location-specific managers responsible for day-to-day oversight of expenses, and regional managers who oversee a handfu lof the locations. These teams need:
- The ability to easily build workflow approvals that reflect this org structure
- Granular visibility without over-permissioning
- Scalable, location-based spend across both Bill Pay and cards
If anyone has tackled this more elegantly than we have, or if Ramp has features in the pipeline that might help — I’d love to know. Any advice, insights, or feedback would be greatly appreciated!!