Ramp

Ramp is an AI-powered spend management platform that 70,000+ businesses use to consolidate corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, and accounting automation into a single system. Instead of chasing receipts at month-end and manually coding transactions into accounting software, finance teams use Ramp to enforce spend policies before a purchase happens, automatically categorize every transaction, and sync clean data directly to their accounting system. Ramp also offers an open API and MCP support (MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard for connecting AI models to external data sources), making it a data layer that developers can query to pull real-time financial information into their own production systems.

How Ramp works

Ramp sits between your employees’ spending and your accounting system, automating the steps that normally require manual work. Here is how the core system operates:

• Corporate cards: Ramp issues physical and virtual Visa cards to employees, with spending limits, category restrictions, and merchant controls set by the finance team. Virtual cards can be created instantly for a specific vendor or one-time purchase.
• Pre-transaction policy enforcement: Before a card purchase goes through, Ramp checks it against your expense policy (the rules that define what employees can and cannot expense). AI-powered Policy Agents interpret policies written in plain English, catching out-of-policy spend automatically without rigid manual rules.
• Receipt matching: After a card swipe, Ramp texts or emails the employee for a receipt. The employee replies with a photo, and Ramp’s OCR (optical character recognition) extracts the merchant, amount, date, and tax details, matching them to the transaction automatically.
• GL coding: Ramp’s AI assigns each transaction a GL code (a general ledger code, the accounting category that tells your books where money went). Customers typically see this automated for over 95% of transactions with no manual corrections needed.
• Accounting sync: Ramp pushes categorized, reconciled transactions into QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, and other accounting systems in real time, cutting month-end close from weeks to days.
• Accounts payable: Beyond cards, Ramp handles vendor invoices, routes them for approval via automated workflows, and pays them, making it a full procure-to-pay system.

What you can build with Ramp

• Zero-touch expense workflows: A finance team can configure designated virtual cards for pre-approved vendors so those purchases never require a receipt submission or manual approval, removing hours of administrative work each month.
• Real-time spend dashboards: Using Ramp’s API, a developer can pull live spend data by department, vendor, or project into a custom analytics dashboard, enabling automatic detection of budget overruns or unusual vendor activity.
• AI policy enforcement agents: Ramp’s Policy Agent lets a finance team describe their expense rules in plain English, and Ramp’s AI enforces them across thousands of monthly transactions, flagging violations before they reach the accounting system.
• LLM API cost monitoring: Ramp offers a dedicated feature for tracking AI token spend by team or project. An engineering team can set budgets for OpenAI, Anthropic, or other AI providers and receive alerts when costs approach set limits.
• Automated vendor payment pipelines: An operations team can connect Ramp to their procurement system so that approved purchase orders trigger invoice matching and payment automatically, eliminating manual bill pay entirely.
• Global multi-currency expense management: A company with employees across multiple countries can issue Ramp cards in 30+ currencies and reimburse local staff in their local currency, with all spend tracked in one ledger without manual currency conversions.
• AI accounting firm workflows with Ramp Stack: Accounting firms can use Ramp Stack, an AI operating system built on Ramp’s platform, to automate client onboarding, transaction cleanup, and month-end close across dozens of client accounts at once.