App Showdown - All in One Spend Management:Ramp vs. Corpay One

Choosing the right spend management platform can make or break your business's financial efficiency. In this webinar, we’re putting two heavyweights—Ramp and Corpay One—head-to-head in the ultimate showdown of all-in-one spend management solutions.

QB Power Hour is a free, biweekly webinar series for accountants, ProAdvisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants presented by Dan DeLong and Matthew Fulton who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks and apps that integrate with QuickBooks.

Earn CPE through Earmark: https://bit.ly/QBPHCPE
Learn about Ramp: https://snip.ly/RAMPSOFB
Learn about Corpay1: https://snip.ly/CP1SofB

Watch or listen to all of the QB Power Hours at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/blog

Register for upcoming webinars at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/

00:00 Introduction to QB Power Hour
00:32 Housekeeping Tips and Resources
01:06 Earning Continuing Professional Education Credit
02:11 Welcome and Introductions
03:54 Overview of QB Power Hour Web Series
04:41 Intuit News and Expense Claims Update
05:50 App Showdown: RAMP vs. Core Pay One
12:04 Spending Platforms and QuickBooks Limitations
19:07 Virtual Cards and Fraud Prevention
27:50 RAMP's Advanced Features and Policies
35:45 Policy Enforcement with AI Agents
37:35 Automating Transactions and QuickBooks Integration
38:41 Ramp's Pricing and Free Features
41:36 Advanced Approval Workflows
42:56 Cashback and Rewards System
47:42 Comparing Ramp and Core Pay Pricing
50:23 QuickBooks Integration Details
56:07 Accountant Partnership and Revenue Sharing
59:06 Final Thoughts and Q&A

Transcript

Dan DeLong: 0:00

Welcome everybody to another QB Power Hour. My name's Dan Long, Danwidth School of Bookkeeping. Worked attu it for nearly 18 years and co-hosting today. Also at few the workshop Wednesdays over at school bookkeeping do com and unfortunately, Matthew's not joining us again today. We, uh, wish him all the best, uh for, his, uh, speedy cover here. So I am flying a solo today. Sort of. I do have a panelist joining us from one of the platforms, uh, today. Uh, Nigel is joining us from ramp. Uh, Nigel, do you wanna, uh, kind of introduce yourself to the folks and we'll take things off.

Nigel Reiff: 0:47

Absolutely. Dan, thank you so much for having me on the webinar today. Super excited to get to talk a little bit more about RAMP and some other kind of expense management and AP platform tools that work really well with QBO. But just to introduce myself, my name is Nigel. I'm a solutions consultant here at Ramps. You can think of me kind of as your technical expert. Happy to dive into the weeds of the product. And my background at least is in ERP and FP and a tool implementations before coming to ramp. So I've been in the accounting software space for quite a while, but super excited to be here today, uh, and have some, some great discussions.

Dan DeLong: 1:24

Thanks again, uh, for joining us. So just a little bit about the QB Power Hour Web series. If you're just joining us for the first time. Or it's every Tuesday at noon Eastern and are eligible for CPE credit through, uh, earmark. There's a link there for the, uh, channel on the earmark app. Courses are typically they're not live CPE, so the courses will be available typically about a week after a live session. And of course you have, um, the links there for, uh, the QB power hour resources for PDFs of the slides of, existing and past webinars that we've had, as well as the recordings and podcasts audio. Great. And so today we're gonna talk a little bit about we always start off with a little Intuit news and, um, it's very fitting. I guess that our, our news today is something that we talked about, not just a month ago, uh, that expense claims in QuickBooks Online is gone. So, uh, we'll talk a little bit about that and then, we'll we, this is, this particular, uh, webinar is kind of a follow up from one that we did a month ago where we talk about the spending managing money out inside of QuickBooks online and what features and, and functions that you can do in there. And like most things with QuickBooks, it is one of those things where if hit the ceiling of what you can do inside of QuickBooks, then it becomes the question or the, the task is what else is out there that works with QuickBooks. So since we did kind of the whole money out, topics month ago. We wanted to do our very first app showdown in which we, we talk about similar apps that are out there to side by side comparison. So we appreciate Nigel from RAMP joining us here today, being open to talking about other platforms, which is, kind of a unique circumstance. A lot of times when we have sponsors and, and that come on the, that could be Power Hour. Talking about other apps is, uh, is a little bit of a challenge you know, to kind of navigate, uh, that during the webinar. So here we are actually doing kind of like a thunderdome where two apps enter, and then hopefully by the end of the, the webinar today, you may see advantages of either or maybe pick one over the other. For for recommendations to your, to you or your clients. So we are gonna talk about when, when a platform is needed inside of things that are necessary, that kind of workflows, that kind of drive that. And then really just kind of talking about ramp versus Corpay one in this particular instance where we'll talk about some of the feature comparisons, pricing comparison, because that's always on most of our minds as how much is this gonna cost me, how my client and then the devil's always in the details as far as the QuickBooks integration part of that, you know, how these things show up or not inside QuickBooks. And then if you are a, an accountant or open to revenue share, what does that look like as far as their accountant partnership? We'll, uh, that's a high level overview. So, uh, like I said, we did a prior session with regards to spend management. So there's a link for that if you wanna kind of see the core functions. But as we're gonna mention here, uh, well, poof, the expense claim just kind of went away without little fanfare. And this is, this is really what it boil, kind of what it boils down to when it comes to, you know, one of the poll questions that we had during that webinar was, you know, have you, what is your experience with, with expense claims? And one of the answers was, oh, well I'm hearing about it for the first time. Um and, that was, um, probably the, most common response. And this is one of those things, just like when we talked about. Tags and the changes with, with tags inside of QuickBooks online is if we don't if we don't use it, uh, we are gonna lose it. So this is one of those things where it really didn't have a lot of users using it. Part partially because it was only available inside of QuickBooks Online Advanced. So that kind of turned, uh, at this is where one of those things where it it just didn't work out for that kind of feature or function. It was, as we kind of talked about before, it was, uh, pretty limited. And then, you know, again, you only had it inside of QuickBooks Online Advanced, so it, was a very small segment of people that could use it. And then subsequently, um. Because of the limitations of, of the features and, and functions of that, uh, it just didn't get a whole lot of adoption. So let's start off with our first polling question. As far as what version of QuickBooks do you support for you and your clients? So while the people are, are answering Nigel, um, have you, you know, with, with regards to, ramp, how do, you communicate changes to the platform and things like that where, there are, you know, maybe features that are added or like with QuickBooks maybe taken away.

Nigel Reiff: 7:40

Yeah, absolutely. We, especially with our partners, we keep them very up to date with regular monthly newsletters of new features that are coming out, things that may be deprecated, but that's on a rare basis to make sure our partners are well-informed with exactly what is coming out, new and ramp, what's changing. And as well, we love to give them an idea of our roadmap so they have an idea of in the next three months, what they can expect in the next six months, what our plan is. Um, so making sure that they're up to date with current releases as well as our planned, uh, roadmap as well, so that way they know exactly what Ramp's gonna have to offer.

Dan DeLong: 8:19

Well, that's, that's good to know that, you won't just log in one day. Expense claims are, missing from, from ramp without some kind of notification. Exactly.

Nigel Reiff: 8:33

And it is a fast moving product. We, we update regularly. Last year we were had over 300 product releases and updates. So we, we certainly continue to push the envelope with the capabilities of RAMP and making sure our partners are well informed with that is a, a huge component of it. So yeah, regular newsletters working with, uh, your relationship lead at RAMP is key. We love to set up quarterly meetings as well to discuss new enhancements and how that can be incorporated into processes. So yeah, we love to be, uh, very close with our partners, making sure that they're well informed.

Dan DeLong: 9:11

So appreciate that. So yeah, it looks like most folks are using, uh, both QuickBooks online and, uh, and desktop today, uh, followed closely. Let me just share the results here. Looks quickBooks online only is about 24%, and holding steady at about 5% is, uh, desktop. So stop sharing there and move on. All right, so let's, um, let's talk a little bit about when a spending platform is, needed. This is typically when you're gonna see the bump up to the top of, of the capabilities or functionalities of QuickBooks and where you kind of look outside of the QuickBooks ecosystem or the back. Uh, so some of the limitations that are in QuickBooks, and we kind of mentioned those a little bit earlier, uh, expense claim when it comes to expense claims and reimbursements, it was, advanced only and no longer available. So if you need. Functionality of expense claims and reimbursements, you are gonna need to look elsewhere because there isn't any version of QuickBooks. That, and of course in desktop it doesn't, do that either. And then when it comes to with QuickBooks, uh, or with Bill pay, with the online bill, pay functions, approvals are gonna be best suited inside of advance because you have a high user limit to be able to, manage those users. Because there are prebuilt roles that are, built in with the QuickBooks bill Pay service. And those roles are going to take up space, right? So if you're in QuickBooks Online plus where you only have five, one of those is a bill payer and one of those Bill Prover, and one of those is a bill clerk, right? Where they're entering in the bills. Now you've taken up three spaces of your five just for those specific roles. And in those roles, you, don't have the ability to combine roles and access in QuickBooks, plus where you can kind of comb through a lot of those, a lot of those roles where in advance you have a little bit granularity with allowing certain areas and certain functions within various other roles. It's best with, regards to QuickBooks bill pay to utilize advanced for those for those features because you're gonna have those roles and, uh, the number of roles available there. And then other versions you end up having, you know, limited features and those limited roles and users. And then. We all like oversight and control. And when that becomes part of the, the workflow or the conversation where it comes to spending limitations, whether it's a pay, a certain payee, certain amount or a certain category and approvals to be able to do those those types of things. And then the policies that, that are built in to the to where these where these workflows are actually stemming, from is if you have those those policies that are necessary, if, if, if it's over a certain dollar amount, we require approval or at least something in a receipt or, or you know, things of those natures. And then the last thing is, is. Adoption of the technology, which oftentimes is a, is a barrier, right? So if you add another app to, the guys that are out in the field purchasing, you know, using the the, company credit card to purchase job supplies and making sure that they include the receipt or do the things that, you know, adopting the technology into their workflow, you know, or their regular workflow is a consideration or concern where, they're already using the QuickBooks mobile app it's a lot easier to adopt that technology as opposed to adding another, uh, mobile app to their, into their mix. So let's, uh, quickly start off with the second poll question, and does your firm. Commend workflow improvement software to your clients. Sometimes it's just, you know, you're, you're in your zone. If, uh, if you do have come across a new software platform or something like that, do you recommend to, your clients as a part of your, like, advisory services. While you're answering that, let's go ahead and just kind of press on here to our app, first app Showdown. I should have like a, some entrance music or something, something like that, where we have this thunderdome type of thing, but, all right, so let's talk about the things and, uh, Nigel, I want you to keep me honest here. As far as the, future similarities. And then we'll of course get into the differences, uh, between the two. But the, similarities, the things that are the same is that most, and if not all bill payment platforms, spend management platforms are gonna have some core features and, technology that are, very similar, right? The ability to import bills through OCR, which is, uh, optical character recognition, I think that's what it stands, which is a technology that turns images or text on images into data, right? And all of them are gonna have, some kind of, both of them are gonna have some email forwarding capabilities where you specific email address you're able to forward from your own email, or they can your suppliers can, you know, forward it directly. To that email so that the system or the platform is gonna be able to scrape off that information and then to turn that into its data that's usable by the platform file upload. Of course, if you have file attachment, you can take that file and place it into the platform so that it does that as well. So you don't necessarily have to forward an email. And then you're also gonna be able to synchronize that from QuickBooks. So if you've already got a bill or something like that inside of QBO, uh, you'll be able to import that into, QuickBooks, or, I'm sorry, into the, into the platform. And then you're gonna have some kind of aspect of a virtual card, right? Where you can kind of spin up a payment card to be able to put that payment card into. Your online billing information, right? So that, you know, one of those things to be able to do that, you know, to be able to pay for those things. And especially if it's a one-off situation. And, uh, when I was at, I'm trying to remember if it was, uh, scaling New Heights or if it was, into a connect where I was talking or went to a breakout session and they were talking about how they use virtual cards to manage pricing, right? So like they were able to create a virtual card for each individual, uh, thing that they were spending for. And Nigel does RAMP have a limitation on the number of virtual cards that you're able to create.

Nigel Reiff: 17:38

No. And yeah, I was gonna jump in there to talk a little bit more about virtual cards, but with RAMP EV employees can be provided as many virtual cards as desired, and we like to think of virtual cards more so being like an allocated budget or funds that can be utilized for specific spending situations. Right. So like you pointed out, a great example is I've got, you know, my Microsoft subscription, I've got. Got my Salesforce subscription, I wanna make sure I'm managing those payments effectively. I can create one virtual card that does all of those, and I can even lock it down within RAMP to say, this card can only be spent at Microsoft, at Salesforce, anywhere else automatically declines. Or I can create, you know, one virtual card for each of those. And you can set up budgets as well to say it should only be able to have, you know,$5,000 spent per month, which may be equal to one of your subscription amounts. And that way if you end up getting, you know, price increases from vendors without being made aware or they accidentally double bill you ramp can help you negate that from occurring and, and prevent it from happening and not have to deal with it retroactively. Yeah, so definitely lots that we could dive into with, with virtual cards and the capabilities there. But the key kind of takeaway from it is it's an allocated budget that has specific spending controls, uh, established within it that dictates how much and where those cards can be spent.

Dan DeLong: 19:02

And the, uh, was that, you know, like, they did a example of, okay, we're our, utility bill or, or something, you know, a phone, phone bill, which is, oftentimes it just increases without your awareness to it, right? So by being able to put those controls on one particular card, a virtual card, rather than a physical card and put that as their payment method, when those things happen. And, there's a spike in, in, my in my, my phone bill and, uh. That will actually trigger an alert, or the card itself would actually be decline, right? And then they'll get, then that'll get attention, right? Like once you've got, um, an informa, you know, an email like that coming into your inbox, like, Hey, we're gonna turn off your phones if you don't pay this, or something like that will actually allow them to control their spending when those things actually increase, and at least get to the bottom of why did, why did it increase? And then of course, they can increase the, uh, the amount and push it through again. Can go through.

Nigel Reiff: 20:28

Yeah, exactly. And another like great example too with that of, like you said, controlling our subscriptions, make sure we're not seeing any fluctuations in pricing we didn't expect, but also, right, I'm giving this virtual card information to this vendor. They have the credit card number and unfortunately data leaks happen. And as much as we wanna try and avoid them, we need to make sure we're prepared to handle those effectively. And like we've said of by locking down this card saying it can only be used at, you know, my specific cell provider or you know, like we've used Microsoft or Salesforce, if there happens to be a data leak, that card information gets into nefarious hands, they can't spend it anywhere. It's locks down to just those specific vendors. So we're helping to prevent fraud from occurring rather than identifying it and now having to address it. We're preventing it from even getting into your system and having that spend ever go out. So it can be huge in that use case as well.

Dan DeLong: 21:20

Now, um, question from rich there in the in chat, and it goes to the next thing is what are spending cards versus credit cards? Now these are, uh, both of them are MasterCard, right? They can be used Square or is your Visa, I'm sorry if I misspoke. Visa is, right. Okay. Yeah. The RAMP uses v the Visa network, and JPay actually uses the MasterCard. So they are accepted anywhere that those are accepted. So Visa, MasterCard, pretty much everywhere. But they are not credit cards in the sense that you want to carry a balance. I found this out the hard way with, uh, with GoPay that they were not credit cards, even though they have the the MasterCard logo on them. It was just not. Clear initially, and that's one of the things that I wanna be clear about, is that these are spending cards very similar to like, uh, American Express, where, you know you, there is a a, spending amount or limit that you can put on there in a billing cycle, but you want to, pay that the, entire balance. You do not want to carry a balance from from month to month because the fees that are associated with that are pretty high. So these are, you know, keep these in mind that these are spending cards. So they will give you you know, a little bit ease on the cash flow situation because you'll be able to use them as, credit cards. They will, go into the, to the monthly statement, but you wanna make sure that you pay that balance off at the end of your statement. And, um, I'll just, uh, kind of ask you. Put in automatic to pay those, those things as part, of your, setup. Right,

Nigel Reiff: 23:25

exactly. So Dan, I think you hit it perfectly on the head of, while you do kind of build up a, a statement balance over the month you do then pay it off at the end of every month. So you're not carrying that balance from month to month, accruing interest on it. Were not built to function in that way. So that, that's really the core difference. So credit cards you can think of, I can hold that balance and just keep it month over month and pay interest on it, like I'm borrowing funds, uh, versus ramp is at the end of each month. I'm just paying off that balance that I owe.

Dan DeLong: 23:56

No, and that's also similar to, uh, Corpay one as well. Um, and as we had talked, you know, there's limits that you can put on the, on the card spending to users, whether it's, specific payee or specific categories of, of payments. And then as we talk about some of the differences we'll kind of talk about what you can do with those limitations. Both of them are gonna have a, an accountant with a client dashboard where very similar to like QuickBook online where you, where you see your practice or your firm, to all of your clients. From there online bill pay is is, similar. Being able to, uh, send checks or send, send the online, online bill pay functionality, and then the card management as well as employee reimbursement when they're using their own card to be able to purchase, billing purchase, materials or job supplies for for the, company. Both of those will have the optionality as well. And they, uh, both have their own mobile application. To manage these things either for the company as well as the in user, me as well. Well, let's talk about a little bit about the differences between so when it comes to the OCR technology, the, the document scanning, one of the things that really impressed me about RAMP is the ability for multiple line support. So when you have, you know, a, a really big bill to be able to import that, and then it'll automatically segregate or separate out the individual line items on the body of the, of the invoice or the bill. And then you, you can then map that to to individual lines as well as being able to, what's the word I'm looking for? Um. Being able to, map to products that are in, your QuickBooks, right? So you can have that item level mapping whereas Corpay one you can split, uh, but you have to do that manually. Mm-hmm. So that's an extra, extra steps, uh, to be able to split things out. Exactly.

Nigel Reiff: 26:27

Yeah. And just to add a little more detail, we've had, our customers have multiple hundreds of lines on their bills and have rent be able to separate it out all for them. So Right. Rather than having to click add line, enter the information, add line, ramp's, gonna do all of that for you so you can come in and just have kind of a quick review rather than having to actually be adding that manually. So can certainly be a significant time saver.

Dan DeLong: 26:55

And as far as, uh, recognizing the item or category. In, ramp, is it something like if people, it will look for the products and services and, map to it if it does have an equal thing? Or do you the, do people need to go into the platform?

Nigel Reiff: 27:15

Yeah, so there, there's a couple different ways that that can work. First, if we're leveraging like a, a purchase order as well, we wanna also have procurement within ramp and we connect that purchase order to our bill and we're establishing that inventory item on the PO that can easily be translated, so that way we do have that marked for us. With current, currently in our product, we don't necessarily pick out that, that specific inventory item for you and code it if it's not on the po. But where we're moving towards, and this is gonna be kind of our, our next evolution of Bill Pay that we're coming out with in just the next few months. So it really should be one to two months from now. Is we're gonna be having an AI agent come in and that's going to enhance the OCR capability. So it's going to learn, oh, okay. When this kind of invoice comes in and it lists out these specific items, and we notice we're coding those to specific inventory items or expense items in QuickBooks, it'll automatically start applying that for us. So that's where we're moving towards of having a, an intuitive system that will understand that. Um, but right now it's a little bit more of, yeah, let's let RAMP know through other parts of our process and then that can kind of automatically tag it for us. Yeah.

Dan DeLong: 28:29

And um, one of the things, um, you know, um, the second bullet here on, on ramp as far as like the cutting edge digital receipt management, what I wanted to, I mean, that was a long way to say, it, helps with fraud detection because sometimes employees and their receipt submissions they might be, um, overstepping. I think that's probably the, the nicest way to say it. Um, David Leary and Blake did a, an episode of How in AI can basically generate a photo realistic receipt that looks like, any, any place that you've been to, right? Like, you can take a depot receipt or Walmart receipt and, and, train AI to create a receipt that looks like maybe there's coffee stain on it or it's wrinkled or, you know, things like that. And, and to the blind eye, it could, definitely be something that you, you might just let flip through because it looks like it. And they were mentioning during during the accounting podcast, that ramp has already. This was like a couple months ago, like RAMP had already implemented, in being able to detect those things. Talk a little bit about

Nigel Reiff: 30:05

Yeah. It, it is crazy, right? We, we've been talking about AI of all the, the help that's gonna provide us the advanced capabilities. Now we have offered, but that also comes on the other end of, ooh, it's gonna provide maybe some problems for us, some headaches, some some different ways that people are trying to gain the system with it. And like you said, Dan, it's AI receipts have been something that has now become a problem of how is a manager gonna know that, like, it, it looks like a perfectly good receipt based on what the employee sent, but can be a completely, uh, fake charge. So what Ramps able to do is basically. Able to view kind of the backend of the receipt, the actual file information, and there's key information within there that helps us be aware of when it's AI generated. Um, so we've, like you said, have kind of started to lead the, the industry in coming up with that capability and almost getting ahead of it before it becomes this massive problem, understanding that this is something that is going to occur. So let's get ahead of it and provide the protections for our customers. So, so they're not falling victim to it.

Dan DeLong: 31:10

Yeah, that, I mean, it's very impressive when I heard that, that not only is it a problem, but you, guys have already taken steps to get ahead of that because, you know, AI is. My Dan analogy of, AI is, it's an enhancer. It's like alcohol, right? If you're a jerk and you drink alcohol, you're just gonna be a bigger jerk. If you're, if you're a friendly person and you drink alcohol, you just become more jolly and friendly. So it's, it's one of those things that if you are nefarious to begin with AI is only gonna help you be more, more of that. If you are, you know, utilizing AI for good, right? Then it will continue to do those things. Exactly. Another thing that it does kind of gives a nod or a difference to, ramp is the additional features being able to put in or help. It helps you create, uh, your policy as far as your spending policy and What What is required of the individuals that are, that are using it. And then you also have, uh, travel, options. You wanna talk a little bit about, uh, those, those things there?

Nigel Reiff: 32:28

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is keeper business of setting up what their policy is and how you wanna enforce expenses, bills, and travel. Uh, and RAMP helps to ingest that and then enforce it for you. So whether it's as employees are booking travel, they're made aware right, of way of what is in and out of policy, whether it's flight prices to different classes of tickets, right? Business class versus economy class. What do we allow depending on the the, duration of the flight, how that fluctuates, um, how early we like to have flights booked. Do we let our team members book, you know, a few days before? Do we require two weeks before? Same thing with hotels and cars, right? Of. Being able to help guide them into what's in and out of policy so we're not having to retroactively review and make sure they're doing the right thing. Ramp's helping to guide them through that. Um, and then where we're moving towards too as well, and, and we're gonna be diving into this in, in future slides too, but is right the, again, these AI agents that we're building into the platform. And what we're starting with is our approval agent. And what this does is it can read, understand, and enforce that policy, what we're finding is better than the actual managers who usually are reviewing transactions. So ramp's able to, uh, intuitively and very smartly. Be able to review transactions and understand if they fall in and out of policy and flag it reject transactions for our team members and be that first line reviewer instead of managers. Right? So helping to take off some of that, that time commitment of just reviewing things and not always knowing is this in and out of policy? And just saying, sure. Review it anyway. Ramp's gonna help enforce that even more cleanly. Um. And also as it does that, and it learns, you know, what employees are doing and, and how managers saying if this should or should not be included, it can start to automatically update your expense policy to reflect that for you. So it can continue to enhance your policy, which then allows it to better enforce it as it goes. So it's kind of a, a dual system of let's enforce it and make sure things are staying in line with what we've determined is acceptable, as well as let's continue to improve it as we see what is being allowed and not allowed, how can we continue to refine it to make it even stronger? So that's kind of how we like to think about this agent, uh, within RAMP that helps to accomplish this for you.

Dan DeLong: 34:45

Yeah. We're,

Nigel Reiff: 34:45

we're

Dan DeLong: 34:46

learning a new term called Ag Agentic ai, which as we talk about inside of QuickBooks with the AI agents, I'm sure other platforms like yourself and others are, using those tools internally to be able to enhance their own, their own part. One of the things that. Gives the, nod to, copay is the ability to auto push transactions to QBL. It's a double-edged sword, right? Like you can you, are gonna be managing the the rules and the workflows inside of the, platform. And you have to be specific to every every workflow as far as a categorization, automatic categorization of transactions. And, it will push those transactions into, QuickBooks without your interaction. And we'll talk about that when we get to, the, the QuickBooks integration piece. But GoPay one does allow that to occur so you can kind of, automate those things. But that's. Things get a little bit more complicated. You're gonna wanna have those oversights anyway, and it is something that you're probably gonna need to review on a, on a regular basis, whether it's you or client. So let's talk about pricing, because we all wanna know how much is this costing, right? So with ramp, uh, the platform itself, especially for QBO, uh, I mean, you have a, you have a plan called free that sounds very enticing. And for QuickBooks Online, it is for the core offering. And the core feature set, uh, it is free. And one thing that is, uh, different, I think with, uh, you know, a unique descrip distinction of brand is that it is completely free, uh, when it comes to. The transactional fees, like most most other, especially the bill pays is uh, you know, depending on how you pay those bills, whether it's a CH same day, aach h checks or what have you, there's a, there's a per transactional fee, with when it comes to that. But it's not so with regards to, uh, to ramp uh, gel. Exactly.

Nigel Reiff: 37:18

So like you had said, when you're leveraging like a QuickBooks online integration, you're able to utilize RAMP completely free, no user charge, no transaction fees, whether it's cards and bill pay. So a CH is checks zero transaction fees on all of those. And there's even capabilities to utilize to, to waive any types of transaction fees like same day ACHs or domestic and international wires, which usually carry fees. If you utilize one of our tools called a RAMP treasury account, basically being a high yield checking account that's managed within ramp, you can waive all of those fees. So now from checks to international wires, all of it, completely free transactions when being able to leverage ramp so can certainly be an awesome offering. And like we said, especially these businesses that are on QBO and we just want an advanced platform. Ramp offers a totally free version for you to be able to utilize.

Dan DeLong: 38:11

And, uh, now if you are using desktop that does, you know, indicate, uh, you know, there isn't a free option or for that, you have to use the plus in order to integrate with that. You also integrate with other accounting platforms at that level, NetSuite and other, platforms as well. But if you are using desktop, you do have the desktop integration plus is$15 per user per month, but you still don't have the transactional fees on, on top of that. Then other features that are part of the plus level is being able to auto lock. Some card spend, so you can set up things to be able to automatically, you know, turn off the card parallel approvers, so to, to avoid a bottleneck. So you can go to either or individuals, advanced routing where it's automatically. Tell me about that because I, I wasn't quite sure exactly what advanced routing actually uh, is.

Nigel Reiff: 39:14

Yeah, so with our approvals when you're on the free version, it's mainly like based on different amounts or I can just set up, you know, basic approval workflows. If when a transaction comes through, make sure this person reviews it. But with more advanced routing, we can do it based on the specific vendor that's transacted with. And this can be card or bill pay transactions. We can route it to specific individuals or even based on how we code line items in the field. So if we're leveraging, right, like our QuickBooks department or QuickBooks class fields, as we're coding line items based on how we enter that information in, we can route approval. So it can say, Ooh, let's go to this department head to approve the transaction, or let's go to this location leader to approve the transaction. So we can get really granular with the, either the transactional information or the user who's submitting that transaction. We can route that that, that approval accordingly. Uh, and it can be conditioned of, if it's this department and it's over a certain threshold amount, right? We, we can start to kind of add on multiple conditions to create a specific approval workflow we want. So you can just get really advanced and really granular with how approvals can flow when you're utilizing Plus.

Dan DeLong: 40:25

Got it. And then of course, there's no transactional fees. And then on the card spend you have a one to one and a half hatchback. And, is it basically as a statement credit, or how does that does that get awarded? In in Ramps

Nigel Reiff: 40:43

speech?

Dan DeLong: 40:43

Yeah.

Nigel Reiff: 40:44

Yeah. So. We like to promote as being much more simple, right? We don't have this certain cashback here on certain types of spend versus points here. And we, and not having that kind of point amount be fluctuating of, you know, companies can now start devaluing your points that you thought that you had and now it's worth even less. So we go the back route. But how you can utilize that a couple different ways. The first couple options are if you want to use it to make ramp even cheaper, you can use it towards your statement payment. So instead of having to pay that full amount, you can utilize any of your cash back to help minimize what you're actually gonna owe back on that card. You can also use it to pay for ramp plus. So if you are leveraging our plus platform, you can use your statement credits to build it towards your plus payment. Um, or instead you can also just pull gift cards for different types of vendors, whether it's airlines, hotels, um, and even restaurants and, and coffee shops. You can pull or you can cash in. Your cash back, four different gift cards that you can use for company events that you can distribute to employees, however you would like to have it utilized. So a lot of different ways that you can leverage that ramp cash back.

Dan DeLong: 41:54

Excellent. And then, uh, we have a, a question in the q and a and I built, this is a good place to ask that. They, uh, you know, because both of these platforms, in order to get the most out of the card spend is to transition to, the spending card, right? So to be able to do those those limits and those types of things, being able to do that requires the company to apply and change their, their. The card that they're actually utilizing. Uh, so they bring up a very good point because they will have a variety of, different rewards. And in this particular case, it's, uh, flight miles and, word points for Southwest, right? So if they move to one of these platforms where it's simple simple enough for, for ramp and it's a little bit more complicated with, with regards to, to Corpay depending on what it is that they're spending on, uh how does that equate to those different types of rewards that maybe they know and like with their current card that they, maybe they would be losing loyalty points or flight miles or, things like that?

Nigel Reiff: 43:10

Yeah, absolutely. It's a, it's a great question too. And RAMP certainly knows that that's a very valuable component of, of credit cards, is getting some of those reward points that we can utilize. So, like we said with, with the cash back that you get, I can use that for cashing it in at Southwest Airlines, uh, and so on by, by, purchasing either gift cards or miles through our, our kind of redemption or, or cashback platform of where you actually want to, to pull that cash back from, or how you wanna redeem it, I should say. But it, it, it is a little bit different over, right? Ramps focus is what we wanna give you those rewards. Our goal is to, instead of. Incentivize or reward you for spending, we want to actually help you control and minimize your spending. So how can we find ways for you to cut costs, whether it's do things like our price intelligence tool that helps you understand the subscriptions you're paying for if you're paying above market prices and tell you that and help you renegotiate to, like we said, policy enforcement, making sure that any spend that's occurring is actually legitimate worthy spend, um, and allowing RAMP to be that police force for you. So we're, we are focused on more so saving money than fully kind of maximizing rewards. And, our, our rewards is based on the business as a whole rather than kind of an individual card cardholder to.

Dan DeLong: 44:29

So you may lose the admirals club or the airport lounge, uh, access, uh, but the money that you're saving or, uh, allowing it to come back. You, it may be a wash, right? That's right. So you might be able to,

Nigel Reiff: 44:46

that's the goal. We wanna help you grow your business, right. Cut costs and grow. And now you're gonna be getting far greater returns than just simple credit card points that I think people, it is certainly is nice. I like my credit card points too, but when we're, we're talking about the opportunity with growing your business, that's where RAMP wants to, lean in and help you accomplish that. And now then you'll, you'll have plenty of money for, your, uh, your lounges and, and airline too.

Dan DeLong: 45:13

Exactly. Now Corpay, uh, the pricing is vastly different, right? So they have no platform or, or user fees as long as you're using it with the card, right? So if you sign up for it, just a bill pay. Option. There's, typically a platform fee based on the documents that are processed. That gets very granular, uh, when it comes to, that like, uh, it's tiered based on volume. And it's also important to note that things pulled out of QuickBooks that, that show up in in the, Corpay one platform are considered the document, right? So if you're paying 50 cents each and it brings in, you know, a whole bunch of bills that you entered in manually or batch imported into, into QuickBooks, that can get pretty pricey pretty quickly, even if you're on comparing that to like Ramp Plus where maybe you have five users that's 75 a month, right? So it could add up to that pretty quickly, even without the per user fee. And then of course they are in the model of the transactional fees, so they are less than some of the other folks that are, that are out there when it comes to the transactional fees. But there Ill still is a transactional fee for a CH dollar per check. The, faster then there's fees on top of that as well. Now, with regards to the rewards, their platform is a little bit differently where they have 1% on all spending. It is a well, copay one was just acquired while, just was several years ago. Uh, they were acquired by FleetCor, which is a fuel card company, right? So they, they are now putting that emphasis on fleet fuel cards so you get more for fuel. So if you are if you're in a company that has a large fleet of vehicles, this, will give you a little bit more on that as well as travel for restaurants in network as well as hotel as well. I did wanna note there that I did see that it's$20 maximum for the five, 5% on, on hotels, with, uh, but everything after that is, goes to that 1%, right? So if it is a hotel that that would give you more than$20, it caps it up at$20 and then everything over that, that 1%. Alright, so let's talk about the QuickBooks integration. So you have the ability in, ramp and Corpay to vendor synchronization. So being able to pull in your suppliers and vendors from your QuickBooks, you don't have to reenter all of that. With regards to the, the cards, with multiple cardholders and with all these virtual cards, it would get very cumbersome to manage all of those accounts, separate accounts inside of, QuickBooks. So with both platforms, you have one, one QB account to manage all of the cards, right? Um, the synchronization between, uh, the two platforms is going to put all the carding, uh, the card transactions into one account inside of QuickBooks. So you won't have one, you won't have that. Balance issue when it comes to what's at the bank versus what's in the account because you don't have that parent-child relationship inside of your QuickBooks chart of accounts where your payments are coming out of one the, parent account and the charges are, are on the other. So you don't have to try to reconcile all of those inside of QuickBooks. So it's just one account for all cards being mapped. You have the ramp has the ability to do product service mapping. Uh, being able to identify and push bills to QuickBooks so that it actually, um, does go to the product. And, talk a little bit about that, Nigel, as far as being able to map to a particular product or service. Does it, does it see that, or how does it, how does that work?

Nigel Reiff: 49:47

Yeah, exactly. So we're able to pull in that information from QuickBooks so that way we can apply it to different transactions. That way as it flows back over, we're able to have it, the expense or the, um, that product service appropriately kind of contributed. So that way we can have full reporting capabilities on it. So yeah, we're able to pull in a lot of information from QuickBooks so that way we're not minimizing the capabilities of, of what information we wanna include on our transactions.

Dan DeLong: 50:18

And then there's no reliance of the bank feeds in either platform. So as a matter of fact you, can't even find the financial institution when you try to connect it. So good news, it won't break. So it won't dis disconnect, uh, because you're connecting it from inside of the platform as opposed to connecting it through the bank feed, you know, putting in your. Login information and those types of things so they won't forget your login which is good. Double-edged sword there. With ramp, all integration and sync must start from the platform. And we kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier, that in order to push a transaction from RAMP into, synchronize it into QuickBooks, uh, you have to acknowledge, approve it and send it. Whereas in Corpay one, you're able to set up some workflows and auto categorizations and those will will automatically synchronize into, your QuickBooks, double-edged sword. If you, if you send, you know you, have to identify all of them in order for this to work smoothly. So the next time that you go to a brand new place, it's going to, you know if, it's not caught by some kind of workflow or rule that you set up in, into Corpay, it will just choose the default, uh, which I was getting a whole bunch of transactions to meals and entertainment, uh, because that, that was the default, even though they're not that is one of the things that is actually in my workflow is like if I see a large amount in meals and entertainment, oh, I need to go back into Corpay and set up my, my, my advanced workflows. And then

Nigel Reiff: 52:14

with, uh,

Dan DeLong: 52:15

oh, you wanna, you wanna add to that? I was gonna say Yeah,

Nigel Reiff: 52:17

just to, to add and, and provide some clarity too of, yeah. It's credit card transactions and reimbursements in ramp. We do have you, like you said, Dan, tell us when to sync. What transactions have we reviewed and we know are good to go, that we can move into QuickBooks. We are investigating and kind of trialing, uh, having it be a little bit more event trigger of, Hey, if certain qualifications are met, let's just sync that automatically. However, with bills and bill payments, that is going to trigger automatically out of ramp. After, you know, you hit a certain event of my bill's been fully approved, now let's sync it automatically into ramp. We've had payment executed automatically sync it to QBO. Sorry, I meant to say sync both of the bill and bill payment into QBO. So it can kind of depend on what transaction type of a credit card or a bill of whether or not Ramp's gonna want you to trigger it or if it'll trigger it automatically for you. But similar to Corpay, we do have the capability to create these rules to help you categorize any expenses. So we do have that functionality as well. However, it's just at the end of the day, we want you to say, yep, this one's good to go. Push it to, to QuickBooks when it comes to credit card transactions. So

Dan DeLong: 53:22

there's reasons for it. So that's, the, it's not just something that you haven't, uh, thought of and the fact that you are thinking of if, uh, if you know, if, if, if everything goes smoothly, then go ahead and automatically push it. Radar is, um is, nice to hear. As far as the Accountant Accountant partnership slash rev revenue share both of them are gonna have a client accountant dashboard where you'll be able to see your you know, all of your clients, like some kind of, being able to, see things across all clients. And then you can go into each individual client, with regard. And one, one of the things that really impressed me about RAMP is the onboarding sessions. When you know, activate your account with, with ramp, you immediately, I don't wanna say bombarded, but you are encouraged to attend some onboarding sessions for the things that you use. So they'll have different sessions and they're recorded or live, but being able to ask questions as you get familiar with using it is a good good thing to do. You can go in and, and do things on the bill pay, on the card, spend, on, all the other things that that ramp offers. And it's pretty early on in the whole process. And then your firm gets plus for free. So if you sign up for as an accountant partnership, uh with, ramp, you get a 500 credit as well as plus for free for your firm. Now, is that for all users or is there like a certain number of users that they're allowed for for the firm, uh, version? Yeah. I don't,

Nigel Reiff: 55:13

I don't think it's limited there, um, with, with number. But yeah, it can, it'd be at least for your firm, but like you said, it's not, not to avoid any confusion, not for, uh, your clients who you would bring onto ramp. They would not get Plus or free. However, through our partnership, you can negotiate more preferred pricing. So instead of paying that full$15 a month or$12 a month of paid annually, we can negotiate with you so that way your clients get preferred pricing by getting referred to ramp through you. So we can help with that. And then on top of it, kind of the, uh, the bonuses that you can get for referrals as well.

Dan DeLong: 55:49

And then there's also a tiered bonus based on the number of referrals, right? Whatever that credit might be. It continues to expand as you, bring out more clients into into the RAMP platform. And then there's also a, an alternative of the recurring revenue shared option where it's based off of the bill pay spend and the card spend. There's some secret sauce figuring out whatever that, uh, works on. And then you get monthly recurring revenue based off of the, account the account spending that they do inside the platform. Whereas copay one, it's a$500 referral bonus for all referrals, which should either be a statement credit or a gift. So overall wrapping it up here, I know we're a little bit over, um, but if you can stay, great. If not, that's fine too. Um. Ramp's a complete spend management platform, and they're future focused. So like the, when we're talking about the AI, fraud detection, policy creation and uploads travel policies and, and those services, uh, the core functions for for, your clients are, are at no cost, even the transactional fees. And can, you can split the services so you don't have to necessarily do all or nothing. So you could just use it for a bill payment platform as opposed to a card management. With Corpay one, it's overall, it's a good platform. The, advantage there is that there's no user fee. So if you are in the, the plus version of ramp pairing those types of things, there is no additional, uh, user fee. So if you have a lot of users, uh, that could, be a, a cost. Consideration. They are focused mostly on the spending cards because of that acquisition from FleetCor. So you'll see a lot of advantages when you do use all, you know, the entire platform. You have multiple cards or, the number of different cards, uh, that you have. And they are kind of drifting away from the bill pay functionality. Not to say that it's gonna go away, but just to that less of their emphasis is on the bill pay function. So if you're looking for new things then that's definitely where ramp not on that. And QBO bills count as documents. So you're bringing in transactions that document fee could add up quite a bit by bringing in those transactions, uh, that are already in folks to begin with. All right, so the last. Polling question, uh, was this useful? You'd like to learn more about either platform Nigel, any, any closing thoughts there before we wrap things up today?

Nigel Reiff: 58:51

No, I think we, we covered a lot of good information today. Definitely two great tools that can kind of help in different ways or provide different advantages to your business and your clients, for helping them increase their capability when it comes to their spend management. I think the last kind of call or that I'll mention is please, please feel free, reach out to us if you'd love to see ramp in action. Uh, see what expensing and RAMP can look like of when you use your ramp credit cards. We can have your expenses be zero touch. If I swipe my ramp card and my expenser report is done completely for me. So more than happy to dive into RAMP with any of you. So please feel free to reach out. We're happy to provide contact information as a follow up, uh, so that way we can show you ramp live in action and how it could be of, of value to you and your clients.

Dan DeLong: 59:42

Okay? Yeah. And we've got a question about, 10 90 nines I saw through, I don't know if you were able to mention that, if we wanted to talk about that live as far as does it process the 10 90 nines or are they treated as Aach H payments? How does that work with regards to the 10 99 processing and or the 10 99 case?

Nigel Reiff: 1:00:06

Yeah, so the way that we look at 10 90 nines is we're gonna be monitoring the spend that's occurring with businesses on both cards and bill pay, and then marking if that vendor would qualify to be a 10 99 vendor instead. And just establish that on the accounts. That way you can see, oh, here are all my vendors that are 10 99 elig eligible, and file'em appropriately. But we do not issue the 10 90 nines or any of the paperwork, uh, related to it. We're simply helping you identify if vendors fall within that. So I'm not familiar with the, the credit card processor is supposed to issue 10 99 K. That may be something, um, that, that Visa could, could step in with, but, but I hadn't heard that of, credit card processors. Yeah, do that. Um, and ramp certainly would not be considered a debit card as we are not transacting and then pulling from your bank account right away, we're building up a statement balance and then you pay at the end of the month. So I think there's definitely some nuances we could get into there. Absolutely.

Dan DeLong: 1:01:06

All right. Um, thank you Nigel for, joining me because I would, I would hate to do this by myself. So I appreciate you uh, joining us here today, as well as everyone that attended our live session. We are gonna have this, uh, recorded and be the podcast as well in in the the, coming moments. We also have our, our hour store for your swag needs. You have, uh, specific questions about QuickBooks or, or anything that, uh, you need help with. We have, uh, quick answers over@schoolbookkeeping.com, available for daily, monthly, or annual options. And we time on the QB Power Hour. A couple weeks we will be talking about our updates. So we'll be having the, uh, the update session where we will kind of. Fill in some of these, uh, AI agents that we've been hearing so, so much about. And some Facebook, uh, q and a, uh, that we've seen as far as more common posts next time on the QuickBooks Power Hour. So we appreciate you, uh, joining us here today. Uh, Nigel, anything, uh, any closing comment?

Nigel Reiff: 1:02:23

No, I think that's it. Really appreciate everyone's time today, learning a little bit more about RAMP and Corpay. And again, happy to dive further into it if anyone would love to to see a live demo of the product.

Dan DeLong: 1:02:34

And we have those links on our, uh, on our landing page. So the, the review and whatnot. You'll be able to do all that from the QB Power Hour quick and.