I travel a LOT, like well over 200 days per year so I’ve got a lot of best practices for handing expense reports to avoid mistakes. Ramp has been a bit of a challenge for this.
When creating a trip I normally go in and pre-stage the expense items for Per-Diem and any mileage for airport run typically staging them for what the last day of the trip would be. This way they don’t get missed in the fog of travel later when submitting.
I don’t screw up and forget these items costing me $
I don’t screw up accounting for my company on a client project by not having ALL my expenses complete when I submit it. (Finding I missed something weeks later after we have submitted to client means I’d have cost the company)…
Ramp does not allow staging an expense in the future. This should be allowed! If the entered date does not match a receipt later that can be flagged as an exception but in cases where there is no receipt like per diem and mileage being able to pre-stage the soft expenses items in my trip makes close out much easier and more accurate.
Thanks @Scott_Blair – looping in Emile from our Product team (@edaou). He’ll follow up in the coming weeks to discuss your suggestions for Ramp Travel.
Poking on this issue again. This is a very frequent issue. Today is a good example. I’m starting a week long trip today. I know there are fixed reimbursements that it makes the most sense for me to stage all at the same time as I’m setting the trip up. The lack of being able to set a future date makes a huge mess of things.
User Story:
There is a round trip for mileage for my partner to take me to the airport. I didn’t bother setting the trip up in advance this time so it’s okay I can set this expense for today.
I know they will pick me up from the airport 6 days from now so it will be another round trip mileage reimbursement. BUT… I can’t set this in the future. So I create a huge mess by making TWO round trip reimbursements for today. This looks like an obvious mistake and will get flagged and declined if I don’t remember to change the date when I’m actually flying back to set it to the correct date.
I have Per Diem reimbursements. I SHOULD be setting this for the END of my trip but instead I have to put it in for today.
I normally try and set up my trips in advance in Ramp (I was lazy this time). Setting up trips in advance and properly staging reimbursements becomes impossible without having just totally wrong dates on everything.
Please stop forcing me to put INCORRECT data into Ramp when trying to stage reimbursements that I might easily forget to reimburse myself for and end up shortchanging myself on. There is a VERY clear reason I have this workflow so nothing gets overlooked. Just allow reimbursements to be staged to future dates!
Hi Scott! Thank you very much for sharing this. I’ve passed it along to the team (for context, Emile is no longer at Ramp). I’ll circle back here with any updates, but wanted to acknowledge that I’ve shared this internally.
@Scott_Blair – Hey! Bilal here, software engineer at Ramp. We actually have a dedicated per diem reimbursement feature that handles exactly this use case — lets you pre-stage per diem submissions for future trips.
To enable it:
Go to Expenses → Settings (top right corner) → Per Diem
Turn it on with your daily rate (or use GSA rates)
Once enabled, you’ll see a new “Per Diem” reimbursement form that supports future-dated trips. Hope that helps!
I’m not the Ramp admin so I don’t have visibility of that setting. Also some in our company use Per Diem and some don’t, so globally automatically adding it in isn’t the right answer either (assuming that is what it is going to do). This solution could also get messy when considering some of the other requests I’ve made here previously with back to back trips where I need to be able to have trips overlapping on the same day.
You keep adding in hyper-specific solutions into Ramp while ignoring the generic solutions that are more broadly applicable. I’ve posted in this thread multiple times about other use cases for being able to generically stage expenses in the future such as mileage for trips to/from the airport.
