The Ramp-Puzzle Integration Reduces Manual Spend Categorization by 50%

Ramp and Puzzle are the ultimate accounting, expense, reimbursement, and bill pay solution

‍

Ramp’s Bill Pay, Ramp Reimbursements, and Ramp’s Accounting API help founders and accountants save 50% of manual categorization work through 99% auto-categorization, when paired with Puzzle.

‍

As a part of our Fintech Tools for Founders series, today, we want to talk about Ramp!

Got a growing startup on your hands? Congrats! this can be both a blessing and a curse. Bookkeeping tasks can steal your precious time. And you're likely to be incurring more expenses and reimbursements thanks to the venture-capital funding you’ve received.

They can feel like a real puzzle for a startup founder.

If you’re a founder, it’s difficult to understand complex accounting processes and how to categorize expenses correctly. 

If you’re a client-facing accountant with many accounts, you are not embedded in any of your client’s operations, so categorization is also highly time-consuming. It requires a lot of back and forth with each client to understand the nature of the expense, get context, and obtain supporting documentation. 

Let's talk about how you can eliminate 50% of your manual accounting categorization and ramp up your process, quite literally, with Ramp and Puzzle. 

‍
Ramp’s Accounting API saves time

Ramp is a leading all-in-one spend management, bill payments, and vendor management solution that recently released an Accounting API to help companies save time.

When you use Ramp and Puzzle (real-time accounting software), all company expenses via card, bills, and reimbursements in Ramp are pushed directly into Puzzle via API, reducing manual work and duplication of transactions. Ramp also matches cash payments to originating bills, further streamlining the process.

The benefits? Less manual work, 50% to be exact! 

• Stop manually duplicating transaction matching and categorizing. When Ramp syncs with Puzzle, Puzzle pushes your unique Chart of Accounts (COA) to Ramp. So, when an expense or reimbursement is coded in Ramp, Ramp’s API also automatically pushes this codification into Puzzle’s accounting software too.

• Stop chasing documentation! Ramp’s API also pulls receipts and memos directly into the accounting system, creating a perfect audit trail.

• Ramp reduces manual work significantly, automating tasks like transaction uploads, categorizing, and cash payment matching.
  

Less manual bill matching, less transaction matching, and less categorization. It’s no wonder Ramp helps companies close their books 8x faster!

The Magic of Ramp’s Bill Pay API on Puzzle

Ramp Bill Pay is an accounts payable feature that allows users to automate bill entries, approvals, and payments with robust financial controls.

When you categorize a bill or transaction in Ramp, Puzzle ingests those bills back into Puzzle through the API. When a cash transaction is recorded, Puzzle auto-matches the cash out (on the bank side) to the bill that came through Ramp. 

Here’s how Ramp and Puzzle work together.

‍

Ramp Reimbursements

When you use Ramp’s Bill Pay API with Puzzle, this completely eliminates all the challenges around gaining context and category details around reimbursements.

When an employee reimbursement is made via Ramp, Puzzle syncs the data around singular line items back into Puzzle with details in the memo line description and a copy of the original receipt. This eliminates 100% of the time you would have been spent looking up expense reimbursement details!

‍

Ramp's Reimbursements feature eliminates the challenges of understanding and categorizing expense reports.

• If you are a founder trying to categorize all the expense reimbursements, you are probably overwhelmed. 
• If you are an accountant with clients who incur a lot of expense reimbursements, you’ve probably sat through the pain of manually investigating and coding each expense, one by one. And that’s after all the back and forth with your client to understand what each line item is for!
  

Companies prefer Ramp for employee reimbursements because it includes the option to pay back employees for out-of-pocket expenses made anywhere in the world, in just two days or less.

But expense reports are frustrating to understand, especially when they are paid out in a lump sum total, without any additional context to how they should be coded.

‍

Ramp Corporate Cards

Card spend in Ramp is directly synced to Puzzle, including the receipt and metadata for 99% auto-categorization.

‍

‍

Ramp Bills

Bills in Ramp are directly synced to Puzzle, for 99% auto-categorization and automated bill <> cash matching. Puzzle also automatically connects cash payments to their original bills and transfers the category information from the bill to the cash transaction.

‍

But that's not all! Puzzle goes a step further by identifying the dates of the originating bill and cash transaction. 

This enables users to easily create an auto-accrual based on the cash transaction with just a simple checkbox. This auto-accrual feature is the first of its kind in any accounting solution available today.

‍

Here’s how the Ramp Accounting API and Bill Pay API work together

• Imagine you upload a bill to Ramp for $2750 owed to HR Services LLC for September HR services.
• This bill in Ramp automatically syncs to Puzzle, creating an outstanding accounts payable in your financial statements of $2,750

• Two weeks later, you use your Ramp account to pay the bill from a bank account. Thanks to the API, you can choose the right general ledger account to categorize this payment to, directly in Ramp. In this case, it’s Consulting Expenses.
• With the help of the Bill Pay API, this payment transaction and all the relevant data, including account categorization, also sync directly into Puzzle’s accounting software.
  

‍

Puzzle's automation workflow immediately links this payment to the corresponding accounts payable bill and automatically reduces the accounts payable balance.

Ramp and Puzzle: Speedier Close and Efficient Accounting

By using Ramp's Accounting API and Bill Pay API with Puzzle, companies cut 50% of their manual categorization time and become more efficient with 99% auto-categorization.

• Fast categorization of expenses paid through Ramp–without any manual work. 
• Automatic AP bill to cash matching, with a corresponding reduction in AP–without any manual work. 
• Instant and automatic context around every single employee reimbursement including memo population and original receipt inclusion–without any manual work or back and forth with the client. 
  

It’s not a surprise that companies who use Ramp save 40/hours per month on expense reports, speed up reconciliation time by 8x, and close their books 10x faster.
‍

Want speedier close and automatic accounting categorizations? Check out Ramp's Bill Pay API with Puzzle.
‍

Want to see it in action? Watch how Ramp and Puzzle work together.

Stay tuned for more guides in our Fintech Tools for Founders series!