Ramp programs are a powerful feature in the platform, and our company deploys them regularly. The ability to bulk issue funds, apply unique policy and restrictions, and keep things in seprate “budgets” is awesome. One super cool use case we deploy programs for are large company events or conferences were we need special cost monitoring, fund assignment, and tracking.
This being said, there is some key missing points.
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We can’t set a budget (or max aggregate program spend.) Employees can either chose their amounts or we can set a flat value per user. If an event’s budget is 80k, that means the one person gets the 80k or I allow my users to choose their amounts and risk running overbudget (let’s say if too many sign up for the event and request funds). Notably - I can set a max amount per EE, but at time of setting up a program it is typically unknown how many users will actually need it and how exactly funds will be split out… having a “total program budget” for notification/escalated approval routing would be HUGE
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The ability to set accounting fields per program (and funds, by the way) was really well thought of. However, it falls short. One key use case I can point out are Internal Events (G&A team offsites) vs External (S&M). While the same pizza restaurant can be used for meals and employees lodge at the same Hilton hotel, the GL accounts will be different. Anyone who knows a bit of tax and accounting knows that the accounting treatment of these should me kept separate and should not be lumped in a single T&E account. The ideal scenario would be similar to the functionality found under Accoutning settings for Accounting fields (Select which accounts are available to your organization) and coding rules (Automate your coding with accounting rules)
This would allow us to restrict GL account options on an internal event to the relevant accounts (Let’s say G&A Meals, G&A Loging, G&A Transportation) vs. S&M Meals, S&M Loging, S&M transportation. To be clear, these are NOT department mappings but rather F/S groupings by function - making discrete GL assignment the only correct path forward. An internal event (such as a planning meeting or retreat could be attended by folks belonging to a combination of departments, and a combination of department to merchant category alone would not suffice for GL assignment.
Ability to automate coding rules at a program or fund level would be the next step. We could auto-assign restaurants for a Company Retreat (for instance) to the G&A meals accounts while lodging merchant categories would be mapped to G&A lodging for this specific program. Similarly, we could auto map airfare merchants to S&M Transportation GL accounts if spent from a Program I created for a National Conference that we attend for purposed of lead generation.
- Questionnaires are super neat. You can add custom questions for folks to fill out prior to requesting funds. We used it sometimes as a “registration form” to capture key info of event attendees. However, we cannot download Program answers, only questions!! very disappointing design miss here
Looking forward to seeing some comments - and I’d love to see how some others are using Programs in Ramp!