10 thoughts on Ramp, the good & the bad

I've used multiple corporate cards. Ramp is the best. They've put on a masterclass in product, partnerships, ops and talent.

The Pros:

1. It's free:
   
   Who doesn't like free? And you get 1.5% cash back on all transactions.
   

2. Exceptional customer support:
   
   I have Chase Sapphire for personal, but I'm paying $500+/year for decent customer support. Ramp's support experience is better and free, even compared to Amex Business.
   

3. Automated rules:
   
   Categorizing business transactions is usually manual & painful. Ramp allows you to set rules for merchants to be auto-categorized.
   
   For ex, Vercel -> Product dept, software subscription. I never have to categorize it again.
   

4. Recurring memos:
   
   For recurring transactions (i.e. SaaS subscriptions), you can set the same memo for every txn.
   
   Never have to write the same memo again.
   

5. Email receipt capture:
   
   This one makes me happy. Multiple card companies will allow email receipt forwarding (throwback to Expensify). Ramp automatically grabs receipts from your email, and you can set multiple inboxes too.
   

6. Talent density:
   
   It's almost a meme to see a tweet that says "Ramp, Rippling & Retool have the best talent hands down". But it's true.
   
   A masterclass in building a great product & attracting great talent. Early Ramp employees will be the next Paypal mafia.

The Cons:

1. Email capture for google groups:
   
   Despite setting up a google group address for receipt capture, Ramp can't tell that the email to the group is the same email to me. I still have to fwd these emails to receipts@ramp.com
   

2. More intuitive text flow:
   
   Getting a text to include a memo is awesome. What if I want to set other fields like dept? What happens if I have a 2nd transaction come through, does the text flow work for the 1st transaction or is it gone?
   
   Text seems like surface-level magic only.
   

3. Ability to add data columns:
   
   I want to append each transaction with additional categorization. Today, that would require exporting the data into a CSV, then manually appending in a spreadsheet.
   

4. Reporting:
   
   If we’re able to add data columns, ideally I can pull any report that I'd like in their UI. Can I slice across time, cardholder names, dept, etc? Can I view a single dept across card transactions and invoices/wired amounts? Can I group by certain fields or write a SQL query?