This is one of our top picks in the category so we recommend it over others (you're on the right page), read below to learn why we love and recommend it! ⤵
This is one of the better tools in its category, see below if this tool is right for you! ⤵
Ramp is our top pick in the expense management category for businesses that consistently hold at least $25K in their bank account. If that’s you, Ramp is an absolute winner—hands down. If you're tired of clunky expense reporting, slow corporate card processes, and feeling like your "finance stack" is duct-taped together, Ramp is awesone. We'd absolutely recommend it for modern companies—especially over traditional options like Amex or slow-moving legacy systems. (Oh, and it's totally free 👀)
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what they do well, and what they could do better. ⤵
The spend management platform for mid-size teams (customizable virtual cards, budgeting, auto-reconciling, and expense reimbursement).
Ramp is a corporate card and expense management platform designed to help companies control spend, automate finance tasks, and gain visibility into expenses. It is definitely one of the best expense management apps available.
But honestly, calling it just a "card" company undersells it. It's becoming the financial hub for startups and mid-market businesses. After onboarding, it feels less like just getting a card and more like upgrading your entire finance process.
Ramp is one of the clear leaders in the spend/expense management, budgeting space, and accounting automation space. They have a great UI/UX, tons of reporting/insights features, and a super clean and fast search functionality to find exactly what you're looking for:
Ramp is for:
Ramp works great in businesses that require giving employee cards, either virtual or physical corporate cards. You can easily add an employee to Ramp, and they can immediately get an account and a physical corporate card sent to them, while you have full ability to set a spend limit on the card.
They do although have slightly higher requirements than that of BILL Spend & Expense (Divvy). You need to have around $25K sitting in your business bank account at the time of applying in order to be approved, which might be tough for businesses that don't really need to be sitting on cash in the bank. But even so, keep in mind that your credit limit is going to be relative to how much is in your bank account, so we still recommend that businesses who are going to have $50–100K sitting in their business bank accounts at all times consider this based on the credit limit you'd get otherwise.
Lets explore Ramp's key features.
We recently switched to Ramp after using BILL Spend & Expense for 5+ years. The reason is that our business went from a consultancy (which better suited BILL Spend & Expense), to a start-up (we fully pivoted when our software review website took off and now have a team of 10).
We found the onboarding experience to be very quick and easy, taking just a few minutes to set up cards and accounts. Compared to traditional banks where onboarding can take days or even weeks, Ramp made it feel like signing up for a consumer app. Ramp does have a nice AI chatbot that you can ask questions to and it's actually helping me understand Ramp better.
Migrating from BILL Spend & Expense was easy, we uploaded historical data from BILL S&E and it Ramp recommended the cards we should create.
Ramp's dashboard is simple and not overly complicated. Key actions like issuing cards, setting limits, and viewing spend were immediately accessible without needing a tutorial.
We struggled a bit to find certain things like our company's credit limit, but then realized you can do CMD + K and it's super easy to navigate, not having to rely as much on clicking around the sidebar. Once we found CMD + K, it was super intuitive to find anything we were looking for.
One bit that we noticed when using Ramp is that they are a bit more focused on SMS interactions instead of having a fully-featured mobile app. If you're out and about and pay with your Ramp card, within seconds you get an SMS asking to take a photo of your receipt. You SMS the receipt to Ramp and just like that, you're done. The user experience is phenomenal when you're on the go.
This is also a positive for those who have employees that aren't as tech-savvy, and you just need them to text a receipt in for it to tie to the expense management side of things.
Ramp has both an iOS and Android app too.
Forwarding receipt options in Ramp are very flexible. You can forward receipts to [email protected], the website under a tab labeled "missing items", mobile app (iOS and Android available), Slack, and even SMS.
Ramp will also automatically retry matching the receipt for 7 days following it sending in.
It even has an integration with the entire company's Gmail inbox and it searches for receipts across the entire team (it connects very securely, read only, and works great). More on this in the integration section.
Ramp has virtual card functionality (and physical cards for employees). You'll want to spin up a virtual card for each company you use with Ramp, and you can even restrict (lock) these cards to a specific merchant.
Transactions showed up almost instantly after purchases, providing near real-time visibility for finance teams. Within a few minutes of swiping the card, the expense was in Ramp.
Offline or mom and pop vendors sometimes took a few hours (vs. minutes) for transactions to appear. This was fine 95% of the time, but we did have to wait for one charge to show up when it was a smaller merchant.
Assigning budgets, setting merchant-specific limits, and building approval workflows were obvious and easy to configure. We liked that it was easy to prevent overspending without being overbearing or complicated. It took literally 10 seconds to put a cap on a vendor card.
Ramp handles "parent budgets" differently by managing them at the reporting level instead of requiring you to manually track them.
Honestly, I prefer this approach—because with BILL Spend & Expense, dealing with parent budgets (and making sure they didn't get exceeded every time you added a new card) was just annoying. Ramp makes it way more hands-off: they automatically show you what you need to see in reports without forcing you to micromanage a master budget.
You don’t have an over-encompassing setup like “we can only spend $10K/year on software and all these cards must tie to that.” And honestly, that's fine for us—actual card-level spend limits are what really set our budgets anyway, and those numbers change so often that rigid parent budgets would just get in the way.
The rewards are pretty standard with others in the space, getting around up-to 1.5% on most categories, with a bit more in certain categories. What we like about Ramp is that it gives ~1.5% cashback without requiring frequent payments or worrying about credit utilization. You pay off your balance monthly, which means fewer statements, less reconciliation, and less stress overall than with other expense management apps.
Ramp allows you to add custom contracts and alerts for renewals:
Ramp has an Accountant account-type which allows them to easily access your account for reconciling between Ramp and your accounting software, and accessing statements. Ramp goes above and beyond when it comes to accountant access and reconciling tools.
Ramp’s QuickBooks integration was smooth to use. Ramp automatically mapped expense categories, reducing manual reconciliation. It auto-tagged most of the expenses correctly without us doing anything...which as a small business we greatly appreciate.
Ramp is also expanding deeper into the accounting automation side of things, integrating with more accounting tools natively compared to others. For example, Ramp integrates in with Kick, the accounting software we're switching to (moving away from QBO after a decade).
Ramp is more so for larger teams, think a distributed remote team with employees all over the world. But with more employees, comes more need for insights and data on spending. Ramp allows you to see your company's spend all in one place. Further, they have AI insights which will alert you of cost saving opportunities like duplicate subscriptions, sudden increases in spend, and possible lower pricing plans available. We think this is super cool, and is a big reason why we'd recommend Ramp for teams with 30-40+ employees.
The "free" model feels almost too good to be true. Ramp's value-to-cost ratio is ridiculous—especially compared to clunky, fee-heavy options like Brex or Amex.
Ramp does make money on interchange, but it also has a per-user/mo tier that unlocks additional features. For a smaller team, these features are not at all needed, so you're totally fine on the free tier, but we believe this allows for Ramp to be a bit more generous with their rewards rates, because they make much of their revenue from larger paying customers.
Just remember: to apply for Ramp, your business typically needs $25K in your bank account to get approved! Use this link to create your Ramp account.
Absolutely. If you want better financial control without burying your team in spreadsheets and paperwork, Ramp is a no-brainer. It's fast, intuitive, and levels up your finance game practically overnight.
Of course, if you're a massive enterprise needing ultra-complex workflows and compliance certifications, you might outgrow it eventually. But for 99% of growing companies? Ramp is incredible.
If you're a scaling team, apply for Ramp using this link. Just remember, you need to have $25K in your bank account to get approved.
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Since Ramp is a corporate card, your personal credit score isn't taken into account and no credit check is required. Their underwriter is making the approval decision based on funds available in your company bank account (like Mercury Bank). You must have at-least $25,000 in your bank account in order to be approved for Ramp.
Ramp uses an underwriter that looks at the funds you have in your corporate bank account (like Mercury Bank) to determine your approved credit limit. They will base this your credit limit on this account balance, so if your account value drops for months, Ramp may reduce your credit limit automatically to a lower amount.
On a $25,000 balance, your limit will likely be less than $5–10K, although you can make an over-payment to get a larger credit limit if you need to make a large purchase.
The Ramp card uses the Visa network, which is arguably the best network to use (even over MasterCard) for these spend and expense platforms because the Visa network allows for restricting purchases based on spend category, unlike MasterCard. This is why BILL Spend & Expense has also switched over to the Visa network from MasterCard.
Ramp is currently US only, if you ask Google or other sites, you'll hear that Ramp Cards work in Canada and other countries, meaning that you can use the in those countries, but Ramp only works currently for US-Based companies.
We've tracked and verified the above companies are using this software in their team's stack.
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