Ramp is a financial operations platform designed to save businesses time and money. On Ramp, businesses can issue cards, manage approvals, make payments of all kinds, track and analyze spending, and automate bookkeeping—all in one place. 

The company is focused on building software that helps businesses be more efficient and productive, and integrating with HRIS providers is a key component of that. 

Anish Ravipati, an engineer at Ramp that leads their product integrations team, adds additional context: 

“Finance teams were spending too much time manually onboarding new employees, issuing cards and benefits one by one, and checking individual charges to ensure that all spend was in-policy. By connecting to customers’ HRIS solutions, we can bridge that gap between HR and finance, and build automated flows within Ramp that turn hours of manual, painstaking work into mere minutes.”

Building and maintaining HRIS integrations in-house, however, wouldn’t be easy. 

Ramp’s customers are incredibly diverse; they come in different sizes, span different industries, and have employees based all over the world.

The diversity of their customer base led to a wide range of HRIS integration requests. For example, customers with employees in Europe were more likely to request integrations with European-based HRIS solutions, like Lano and Personio, while customers with employees in the U.S. were more likely to request integrations with solutions based in the states, like HiBob and TriNet.

Accommodating all of these requests, quickly, would prove challenging. 

“Aside from the technical challenges of building and maintaining HRIS integrations in-house, we’d also have to deal with complex partnership agreements,” says Anish.

The team at Ramp eventually decided to use a 3rd-party integration solution.

Once the team at Ramp built to Merge’s HRIS Unified API, they were able to add 30+ HRIS integrations, which includes enterprise-grade systems like ADP and UKG, as well as systems geared towards SMBs, like Gusto and Humaans.

Through the integrations, customers can sync a wide range of fields with Ramp, including employees’ full names, job titles, departments, managers, and locations. 

These syncs enable Ramp to automate the following workflows:

• Card provisioning: If an employee in the connected HRIS doesn’t have an associated phone number or email address in Ramp, the Ramp admin(s) will be notified and can add the employee with a few clicks

In addition, based on the newly-added user’s information and the rules the customer sets for their corporate card(s), the user will be assigned the appropriate card(s) with the correct spend limit(s). 

• Card updates: When an employee’s information is updated in the integrated HRIS, the corresponding fields in their Ramp account automatically update too, which can affect their card access and spend limits 

• Card deprovisioning: Once an employee in Ramp no longer has an associated phone number or email address in the integrated HRIS, an admin will be notified and can remove the employee from Ramp (which includes deprovisioning any of the cards they had access to) in just a few clicks

Now that they’ve built to Merge’s Unified API, Ramp can add HRIS integrations with ease. 

“Using Merge, we simply have to check off a box to add a new HRIS integration. This gives us full confidence that we can support any of our customers’ HRIS integration needs over time,” explains Anish.

In addition, thousands of customers are now using these integrations and can see the difference.

Anish explains further: 

“Having customers manually issue cards and update roles and privileges for each employee is incredibly laborious and not the best use of their time, especially when they have hundreds or thousands of employees. By automating most of this work on a customer’s behalf, we’re able to help them save several hours per week and avoid costly human errors, like forgetting to deactivate a former employee’s corporate card.”

Finally, the HRIS integrations are also helping Ramp close deals. 

Paul Durocher, a Senior Sales Manager at Ramp, adds more context:

We look forward to helping Ramp roll out more HRIS integrations to further improve their customer experience and close rate.