Name: Building an employee spending program that runs itself with Ramp and Uber for Business
Uploaded: 2026-05-14T18:46:09.640Z
Duration: 29 min 45 s
Description: Building an employee spending program that runs itself with Ramp and Uber for Business

Transcript for "Building an employee spending program that runs itself with Ramp and Uber for Business": It's all about building an employee spend program that runs itself with Ramp and Uber for Business. As companies grow, there's a pattern that we see over and over again. Your business scales and your finance workload scales right along with it. So more transactions, more receipts to chase, more accounts to reconcile. So today, we're going to show you how to build a spend program that scales with your business without scaling your team's workload. To give you a quick preview, we'll cover the inflection points where spend programs typically break. We'll walk you through how Uber for Business and Ramp solve those challenges together, and then we'll leave you with a stage by stage playbook you can take back to your team. Before we dive in, we'll do quick introductions. I'm Grace Chang, an implementation lead here at Uber for Business. I work closely with, our customers to onboard and roll out our programs and help teams set things up to scale from day one. And I'm joined today by John from Ramp. I'll let him introduce himself. Thank you, Grace. My name is John. I'm a solution consultant at Ramp. And I wanna tell you a little bit about Ramp and myself, but I work with a lot of our enterprise customers doing the technical evaluations and bringing them onto the platform. And if you haven't heard of Ramp before, I wanna tell you a little bit more about Ramp itself. So Ramp has been around for the past seven years, and what we position ourselves is the modern finance platform for businesses. We're serving over 50,000 customers across the globe. We are a corporate card and expense management and and finance automation system. We're processing over a $100,000,000,000 annually and we're very excited to dive into the session today. And I think the big focus too, while we're talking today, it's gonna be on the corporate card and expense management side. We are running on the Visa network, so very excited to show you some of the technology we bring to the corporate card space. Thank you, John. Super helpful. A quick question to kick things off. What's the most unique thing you've ever expensed? Oh, that is a great question. There there it's it's funny working at a a a credit card company. There we we I get to travel a lot, especially in sales. There's a lot of weird expenses from, you know, like, overpriced matches, but if a one comes top of mind, I did have the pleasure of going to a gala one time, and I got to an expense, the tuxedo. So that's the bow tie, suspenders, and everything that went with that. So that that was a fun trip. There's some fun photos that I think if if reach out to me, I'm happy to send some of the photos to everyone anyone that they ask, but great to talk to you. That's a good one. I think for me, it was supposed to be a quick ride to the airport, but it turned into a full city tour due to the road closures. So the map of my trip definitely looked more like a sightseeing route than a direct ride. This was also a definitely fun one to explain to my manager. Oh, that's fun. That's it. I don't know. And to get started for quick housekeeping, please drop any questions anytime in the q and a tab. We'll try to answer as many as we can live, and then we'll follow-up with you after. There's also a get demo button available if you want to connect afterwards, and resources are in the docs tab. Lastly, a recording will be sent to everyone after the session. To kick things off, let's start with a scenario that might feel familiar. Your company just crossed a 100 employees. At 30 people, things were manageable, but now you've got hundreds of transactions each month, receipts piling up, and month end close becomes a fire drill. And this is what we call the growth tax. Every new employee doesn't just add output. They add transactions, receipts, policy questions, and reconciliation work, and it compounds very, very quickly for the finance team. Yeah. And to break down some of the data behind this growth tax, not many people realize how expensive the average expense report actually is. And when you start to look at the manual process that's behind every swipe, it's actually costing it's around $58 per employee in twenty minutes per person. And while that may not feel like much, when you start to count all the employees in the organization, those time and money savings really do compound. You have to think about how much time it's spent for someone in audit and from the swiping the card, chasing down the receipt, figuring out the right category, all that adds up. And what we're finding and and really important finance leaders are finding themselves, there's an inflection point. Right? There's a lot that can be saved for the organization when you apply the right automations to this. And we believe that Ramp and and really with this partnership with Uber for Business, right, we can really dramatically cut down this. And we're gonna introduce this concept of, hey. How can we get to, like, a very much a time free expense report and really eliminate that kind of legacy process? Yep. And the manual process doesn't just affect finance teams. Employees feel it too. So we have 78% of employees saying expense reports are too time consuming, and that's assuming they get them right. So, globally, today, companies spend thousands of hours each year just fixing these expense reports, and it does feel manageable at first until suddenly it isn't. John, can you walk us through how things change as companies grow? Yeah. So something that's very interesting is a a data from analysis of 218 Y Combinator, and these are b two b companies, is showing that that this really scales in distinct phases for financing. So I wanna start with, like, the five to 50 employee range. Those are companies where it's very much like a founder led finance motion. Maybe you have outside or outsourced accounting functions. But all expenses are happening on people's personal cards. Right? There's actually not, like, a corporate card in place, and people are having to do manual reimbursements. Meaning, hey. Like, I swept my corporate card. The business doesn't see that spend, and maybe thirty days later, I submit a receipt to get reimbursed for that. That takes a lot of time, and it's very consuming for, like, a founder of an organization. Once you get to the second bucket, what we'll call this next phase, like, the the 50 to 250 employee headcount, we're finding that finance team starts to grow, like, their own dedicated headcount. And their whole job, right, you have to think about the ERP setup, payroll, month end close. And this is where we still see a lot of the same reimbursement driven culture personal credit cards, but it's becoming very time consuming where you start to actually allocate headcount just just to manage that T and E process, which I think is one of the critical points when we move into this 251 to 500 employee company. We're seeing financing sometimes between eight to 15 or more where you have very specialized roles where people are spending a lot of time just looking through receipts and trying to figure out if reimbursements are, you know, in policy, not in policy. This is where I think automation becomes very important or else the volume starts to overwhelm that kind of team, and it can start to be very bad if you continue scaling like that. And that's where Ramp is really positioned to. And as we get into this is we run very lean when it comes to, hey. How do we give automation and the right tools of finance teams so you don't have to worry about that sprawl in the, you know, the laborious month end close and chasing down receipts. And it's about, hey. Having the right tool that can actually do a lot of those re routine task and refocus where your team's spending time. And to to to really lay this out, there there's two problems, you know, to solve. And I think these are two problems that Ramp is doing very well when we get into it. One is you wanna figure out how do you standardize the spend. Right? You're for any company you're spending across maybe its software. It's travel, lodging, airfare. You have vendor bills. You wanna really organize that and standardize it so there's a very easy way for employees to buy, and you have visibility. So we're gonna talk a bit more about, like, the credit card process. But when people are doing reimbursements, for example, out of pocket, that's not a standardized source of spend and you have no visibility of that. So making sure, hey. Like, can we roll out corporate cards as we get into that? The second piece is automating what happens after. When a a spending event happens, you need a receipt. You have to categorize that. You need to have all this data that can back up that expense. You wanna find ways to make sure, hey. How can a system do all that for me? So you're not relying on scaling headcount just to chase down receipts to categorize expenses and try to close those books. So excited to show how a lot of the tools can really solve for that as we go through it. And this is really, I think, the the tip when we think about, like, what Uber for Business is solving. And it's really fixating on problem one, and Ramp is gonna be on problem two. And what happens when you start to connect and integrate those is where you get to the stage where you can really start to scale a company and not worry about, you know, the finance sprawl and having to scale headcount just to achieve some receipts. If we think about where a lot of the spend actually does come from, ground transportation and meals are the high frequency everyday expenses like rides, team lunches, client dinners, and that's exactly the type of spend that creates a ton of manual work for finance teams. And early on, the biggest opportunity is this, to spend get spend off of personal cards. So with Uber for Business, employees have that toggle within their Uber app so they can separate their personal and business transactions. And from that point on, every business ride or meal is automatically billed to the company. So no personal cards, no reimbursements, no receipts to track, and this does be extend beyond rides with Uber Eats. Uber Eats for business gives access to 1,200,000 merchants across 10,000 plus cities. So rides and meals are all managed in one place. So now that everything is centralized, the next step really comes down to how do you control that spend as you grow. And in this growth stage, it becomes all about balancing flexibility with the control. So you can expand on the programs while putting the right guardrails in place. So, for example, executive or client travel, you can offer reserve business black with prescheduled rides, flight monitoring, and reliability protections. But for the everyday employee, you can also set spend limits. So that can be per trip, per day, per week. You can set ride type restrictions to limit access to premium rides for specific groups. Also time based rules like late night rides only during certain hours. Lastly, you can also require expense codes or short memos, so we can ensure that every transaction has the right context for the finance team. And the last bit great thing is that everyone is able to see the restrictions through the business hub, so employees will always know what's in policy. So we're offering employees the flexibility, but within a structure that finance can actually manage. Now at the scale stage, the goal really does shift from control to making sure you're operating efficiently at scale. So you're not no longer managing spend case by case, but you're really setting up a system that runs itself across the entire organization. And that does include department level spend, so different policies for, let's say, sales or engineering, higher limits for client facing teams, and automated roster management so that employees are added and removed automatically. And this is honestly the point where visibility becomes very powerful. So you can see where you're overspending, which teams or regions actually drive usage, and how these policies are being used. And further deeper, you can see additional insights like trends by time of day, ride type, opportunities to optimize any sort of cost, and also pull sustainability metrics like c o two emissions. So at the end of the day, you're reacting to spend. So you're sorry. At the end of the day, instead of reacting to spend, you're actually managing it in real time. So at this point, the system is essentially running itself, but the main point is you don't have to wait until your app is scaled to start. You can standardize and control spend from day one. But what happens after the transaction is where the real lift happens, and that's where Ramp comes in. John, over to you for a quick demo of how this works. Awesome. So we're gonna talk more about, you know, what happens again after the expense. And a lot of this is really achievable when we talk about this integration with Uber for business. So I wanna talk a little bit more again, like, how can we transform finance teams where they can handle essentially the same workload, but it starts to compound or one person. It's almost like getting superpowers. And to to talk a little bit about, like, some of our existing customers. For example, we have a customer, Cursor, who's using Ramp. It's a $30,000,000,000 company of revenue, and they have a finance team of three. Very similar outcomes over at perplexity with a finance team of 10. Or what they're really focused on and what Ramp is delivering, right, is tools that can help automate the expense management, the accounts payable. This is one platform for this that's also integrated within their system, so you're removing a lot of that redundant work. And what happens is when you're not worried about, you know, chasing non expenses and trying to figure out what receipts are and that gets automated, you really get to shift the work to more strategic goals. Right? And and that's really what Ramp has delivered as a tool. And I think Uber for Business, what we're gonna see here, it's one of the many ways to do that, and it's very critical, especially as you're scaling, to make sure you're not getting stuck in that laborious task. Now when we start to look at about really, you know, the the personal Uber and personal card workflows, What we're gonna see is that, you know, in the current state, an expense, right, may maybe someone spends $38 for an Uber ride, but the hidden cost adds up with the time. How long does it take somebody when they have to upload a match receipt? How long does it take that person to understand how to categorize that? To answer questions if they should get an UberBLACK or not? How do they know that's in policy? And when you think about the approval and what it takes to sync, right, you're looking potentially fifteen minutes per expense. But when you add up and you could have, you know, dozens of expenses for just one trip across hundreds or thousands of employees, those hidden costs really add up. And I really wanna emphasize too, like, this is what I think many companies are currently stuck in where they didn't have the right tools in place and say they're using their personal cards getting reimbursed for it and they're just using their personal Uber application. This is where it really gets different when we start to transition and what we try to deliver, right, is the time savings when you combine Ramp and Uber for business. You swipe your card, and then Ramp is taking care of the rest by automatically getting that receipt, automatically categorizing it, and then automatically syncing that into your account link system like QuickBooks. So instead of having to chase down and worry about doing expense reports, right, you just go to the Uber app, you order your Uber, and then Ramp is taking care of the rest from there through those integration points. So that's where a lot of that magic comes to deliver great outcomes where we can really start to save people a lot of time. And what you get out of, again, that work where, hey, for many finance teams, they're really stuck in that busy work. Right? That kind of integrations is all about eliminating that. So there's no more worrying about, hey. Look. What's in policy or not for folks who are confused for, you know, trying to expense something? But when you start to leverage that corporate card with integrated systems, it becomes a much smoother process for everybody involved in that system. So what does this look like when everything is connected? An employee takes a ride or orders a meal, and as long as they're using a Ramp card, everything happens automatically. Ramp will collect the receipt. It'll verify it, match it, and categorize it. So there's no receipt for the employee to save, no report to file, and no manual coding. So employees can still toggle between the personal and the business payment methods. And for even tighter control, you can issue Uber dedicated Ramp cards. John will quickly give us a demo of how all this works together. This is now on the Uber application, and this is just the same app that I use for my personal use, but there is a section for my business profile. You can see I'm connected here to my Ramp and employee travel. It's a very simple setup for any employee or business to do from an administrative side. And once connected, right, I could see some of the different perks that I have access to. And, really, the big focus today is about the seamless expensing. With this integration in place, when I go and and use my Ramp card, say, just on my Uber profile, right, that's how Ramp is able to take care of the rest where it sees all the trip details, the expense, and starts to do it in real time. So what's that look like? Right? When we use a card and what's it mean for it to be a very touchless experience, I always like to show what it looks like from the like a text message. For Ramp users, when you're using that Ramp corporate card, the moment you do swipe it and say, I, you know, I got a $51 Uber at the airport, Right? I can see in real time, hey. Where was that spent from? Meaning, my Ramp card. I also see context. I was, you know, getting an Uber after the airport, and Ramp is helping me essentially write the memo. And a lot of these details are all coming from Uber right at the point of sale. You'll notice Ramp is telling me, hey. I'm all set. I actually didn't have to do anything. I just swipe my Ramp card, and then I'm getting a notification in real time saying, hey. I got all my details. We'll take a look at the Ramp application as well in a moment to see this transaction in Ramp where as an employee, I'd have to do anything. And when we think about, like, the questions, right, like, as an employee, if I'm confused about my policy, I can actually just text Ramp, like, hey. What's my policy for Uber? Ramp is responding. This is using AI saying, hey. Looking at the expense policy for that organization, I could see exactly how I should be, you know, functioning with Uber. Am I allowed to get them, etcetera? So it's really about answering a lot of those busy questions for users. But, again, like, I swipe my card. I'm not actually having to do anything is one of the big points. And then as we navigate into the Ramp application, this is my mobile app where we can see a transaction on the other side. Alright. We see all the transactional details from from the Visa network. Right? But we also see, hey, that memo where it says, hey. The trip from and those details from my airport ride, I didn't have to type that in, but that's coming automatically. We're fetching those details from Uber. And then we're also when we think about the categorization, this automatically got coded for me to my NetSuite GL account to ground travel. It also knew my department, so I'm not having to tag any of this. And when I click into the receipt, I'm also not even uploading receipts as well. This is all from that integration. So those are those time savings where, you know, in the past where the personal card, maybe someone submits a reimbursement. But now this is all very much automated. It's happening in much more real time, and you'll have full audit log where you see, hey. There's a lot of task here where I swipe my card and Ramp is doing the rest working with Uber to essentially integrate and bring in all the data to make sure that we can close our books on time. So that's gonna be it from the mobile app application, and we're gonna start to transition here and go into more of a q and a. But thank you. And going back into going back into the deck. So we'll transition now more for how that works together. Yep. So key takeaways from this session, if you remember anything at all, would be to understand that growth tax is real, but it is solvable. So you don't need to keep hiring to keep up. The formula is fairly simple to standardize at the source and automate what happens after. And lastly, you can start wherever you are today. The earlier you build the system, the easier it will be to scale. And we can turn to questions now. Let's see. First, from Kendra, how does Ramp work with QuickBooks? John, can you take this one? Yeah. So Ramp has an out of the box integration with QuickBooks. That's with QuickBooks online and with QuickBooks desktop. The whole idea, hey. We can bring in all of your accounting information for GL codes, departments locations. And when transactions happen, we can start coding them in real time and sync that back with a sync that back to QuickBooks with a touch of the button so employees do not need to log in to different systems to send an expense report. Perfect. Thank you. And next up from Kim, how does the reporting on the integration work? I can touch first on the Uber for Business side. All transaction activity updates in real time. So at any point, you can filter by date range, export your Uber data. There's also an insights tab from the admin dashboard that helps you track trends and usage across the company. So things like the ride types, locations, and overall spend patterns. John, do you wanna walk through how that comes together on the ramp side? Yeah. On the ramp side, you can think about, like, the financial component to that. So we have all the transaction details. Again, we know that's from Uber, but then also the information from the memo, employees, departments, their locations, all of that account information where you can start to run span spend analytics reports and understand, hey. Like, how much are your employees spending, not just on Uber, but across all the spending for any kind of trip when they're traveling. Thank you. And then next from Erica. My policy is pretty complex. Can I customize by team or role? From the Uber for business side of things, absolutely. You can set up different programs, controls based on the team roller use case. We often see this with ride types or spend limits. And then for even more granular control, you can add in, additional rules within Ramp. John, can you go into some of the controls available for them? Yeah. When you think about the more the other controls on the Ramp side, because we're getting the receipt, the memo of that fuel information, you may have expense policy related audits that you want to do. So this could help flag, for example, hey. Any data on that receipt, if someone got an Uber BLACK and maybe when they should have an attendee listed, right, or is it getting categorized to the right place? So we get to apply OCR and AI to look at all that receipt metadata and make sure that's complying with your expense policy. So I like to say, no. You're you're getting you're getting guarded from both sides. Right? You'll have controls on the Uber side that very much complement on the Ramp side to make sure that you have a cohesive policy at play. Absolutely. And next from Joe, do employees need to download a separate app for Uber for business? This is a great question. We get this all the time. To clarify, Uber for business isn't a separate app. It's an added layer within the existing Uber app, so employees can simply switch between their personal and business use using the same app that they use today. And to close, I do want to give huge thanks to John and everyone who joined us today. Before we wrap, John, can you walk us through the current Ramp promotion? Yeah. So this is exciting. So right now, what what you know, every customer is getting a $500 bonus when you switch to Ramp. All you have to do is go to that website, ramp.com/uber, to qualify. So looking forward to, you know, welcoming more customers. Thank you. Thank you everyone for your time. A quick reminder before we hop off, the recording will be sent within the twenty four hours. We'll follow-up on any unanswered questions, and still, the get demo button is still live. Thanks again, and we'll see you soon. Thank you. My name is Michelle Amos. I work for Qualtrics, and we use Uber for Business to improve our employee experience. I'm Steve. I'm from Mastercard. I use Uber for Business to ensure that I have one less thing to worry about when I travel for business. My name is Laura from Autodesk, and we use Uber for Business to travel the world more efficiently. My name is Gabriela Antigua, and we use Uber for Business to improve our travel program. So first and foremost, if a partner and if a program is gonna deliver a seamless experience to my end user and to my customer, I am intrigued. And with Uber for Business, it's delivered exactly that. I don't have to worry about whether the trip that I am booking is compliant, whether I've booked the right ride type. I know that the currency is there ready to convert to my own home currency. I know the invoice is in exactly the same format in whichever location I'm traveling. So to have one thing less to worry about, that makes everything incredibly easy. Employee experience when they're traveling is absolutely number one. We are focused on making sure that employees are happy, that they're comfortable. That's our main focus, and I think Uber for Business makes it pretty seamless for us. For us, it's very important as a global company to have global partners that can give services to more than one location and ensure the employee satisfaction that they don't have to use multiple app for the same services and multiple the vendors for the same services, and they will have the same experience in every country that they may be. All an employee has to do is simply click a link, and their personal Uber profile is connected to the Qualtrics Uber for Business account. They also don't have to submit expense reports since it's billed to our corporate account. And it's a tool and a service that they're already so used to using personally. They already are delighted with, and they can experience that for work as well. We have employees on the road, you know, every day, all day. They're traveling to all parts of the world, and so they can pull up their Uber app. They're getting to SFO. They're going to JFK. They're going to Singapore. They can always find a ride, a rideshare, so it kind of meets all of our needs. In the last six weeks, I've been in Poland, I've been in Portugal, Spain, The US, you land in a location, and I know that Uber for Business is going to be there to get me to where I need to go.