[HN Gopher] Ramp raises $300M to keep saving time and money for ...
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Ramp raises $300M to keep saving time and money for businesses
Author : zuhayeer
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-08-24 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ramp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ramp.com)
| stephenhuey wrote:
| In January 2021, they would not let me create virtual cards for
| my consulting business because I did not have a $250K cash
| balance in my business bank account. The Ramp support guy said he
| didn't know of any similar service that did not have such a
| requirement. After that I discovered Stripe easily provided that
| service for my business with no threshold at all and wrote back
| to let him know and he was very surprised I could get that
| without even having a Stripe merchant account.
| iancarroll wrote:
| I use https://mercury.com for this and it is great; I have a
| card for each SaaS app with their own limits. Just a standard
| debit card so no credit complexity.
| ejstronge wrote:
| Did they let you open an account before imposing this limit?
|
| When I was looking into using them, I noted the $250,000 limit
| for new accounts but I'm not sure if they were always
| structured this way.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| That is a crazy high requirement. I am planning on moving to
| Miami and they need evidence that I've had >3 months rent in
| the account for 3 months. Who keeps that much money in a
| checking account?
| Terretta wrote:
| _Everyone_ should work towards being able to keep minimum 6
| mos of burn in their checking account. Ideally more.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Checking account earns no interest. That's a foolish waste
| of money
| Johnny555 wrote:
| You could put it in a savings account where it earns .01%
| interest (which is what my bank is paying right now).
|
| So that 250K would earn you a cool $25 in a year.
| kyleee wrote:
| Until it's right there when you need it. It's not called
| an emergency fund for nothing
| Retric wrote:
| Any way you slice it 6 months living expenses earning no
| interest is a huge expense. For the average person
| putting that away at 30 means delaying retirement by
| around 2 years. Worse you need to keep adding money in to
| keep up with inflation.
|
| It's reasonable to keep 6 weeks of living expenses on
| hand, but the rest doesn't need to be in cash as long as
| you can quickly liquidate it.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/753/231/981...
| rozap wrote:
| Keep as much as you need to give you time to liquidate
| other things (like stocks or mutual funds). Especially with
| inflation as high as it is, keeping that much money in a
| checking account is just boneheaded.
| gruez wrote:
| >Keep as much as you need to give you time to liquidate
| other things
|
| And what if there's a crash and your savings takes a 40%
| haircut?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >And what if there's a crash and your savings takes a 40%
| haircut?
|
| Also, it's worth noting that there is likely a strong
| correlation between a financial market crash and sudden
| unemployment or other issues.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Why would you want that in a checking account rather than
| an instant access cash saving account though? Savings
| interest rates suck atm, but might as well get whatever you
| can on it.
| luckylion wrote:
| Not sure how they are in the US, but I've gotten 0.01%
| last year on my cash savings account. It's not worth
| keeping money there. The time you spend moving it from
| there to your primary account eats the interest.
| ptudan wrote:
| You can quite easily get .5% from anything called a High
| Yield Savings account. They are FDIC insured. You used to
| be able to get as high as 1.5%, though with fed rates
| dropped to 0 that has gone away.
|
| But .5% is still 50x higher than .01 (and many multiple
| times higher after a few years of compounding interest).
|
| If you have a 15k rainy day fund, you're easily throwing
| out 1k a decade by keeping it in checkings.
|
| I use marcus, not affiliated but here:
| https://www.marcus.com/us/en/savings/high-yield-savings
|
| Edit: missed the part about you not being in the US. Not
| sure what options you have, but to any americans reading
| this, use high yield savings!
| sebmellen wrote:
| https://Privacy.com also has a great "Team" account.
| sandstrom wrote:
| Out of curiosity, anyone who knows how they're making money?
|
| Their pricing pages says that everything is $0 (free).
|
| https://ramp.com/pricing
| randtrain34 wrote:
| Guessing it's from interchange, similar to most credit card
| providers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee
| [deleted]
| ninjastar99 wrote:
| Really big fan of this company. Saved our team a huge amount of
| accounting time in the first week alone, and on-boarding was
| super easy (less than 48 hours and we were running).
| cdolan wrote:
| I'll bite - how did they save you a bunch of time in the first
| week? And how much time are we talking?
| ninjastar99 wrote:
| We converted from Amex Platinum Business and Chase Ink to
| Ramp. Before Ramp, each of our team members had one corporate
| card, and had to submit documentation for each charge on
| their card monthly - what it was for, which project it was in
| relation to, etc.
|
| With Ramp, we can instantly create multiple cards per staff
| member, so they have one card per project we're working on.
| Our accounting group then immediately knows how to categorize
| that expense (because that card is ONLY used for that
| project), and Ramp reminds our staff to forward along the
| receipt (which it automatically links to the transaction).
| Our accounting group doesn't have to lift a finger.
|
| It makes the whole process completely mindless, whereas
| before it was filled with lots of busy work to keep our
| accounting clean and organized.
|
| The fact that it's free is icing on the cake. Big fan.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Went to their website. Their demo video starts by saying
|
| > Ramp is the only spend management platform that helps you spend
| less.
|
| Am I the only one extremely put off by this? You can have your
| puffery about how you're the best, but don't insult my
| intelligence.
|
| I'm also instinctively cautious about "AI" powered accounting.
| The way the AI powered receipt recognition is presented makes the
| AI seem much more powerful than it probably is. I highly doubt
| you could get it to recognize a crumpled receipt. If users
| believe the AI is actually that good they are likely to post
| transactions without checking them, creating headache down the
| line.
| kyleee wrote:
| You are not supposed to think twice about the Marketing
| Department lies; the wager is that more people are attracted by
| the Trump style bravado than those who are turned off by it.
|
| Would be nice if that calculus changed, though
| burlesona wrote:
| FWIW we use Ramp at CoSell and really like it. As an admin it
| makes life easy, and I've found that issuing every employee a
| company card is super nice. The expense reporting is especially
| nice, no need for expensify etc. Happy to answer questions if
| anyone has any.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Well, what really matters in finance are the financials. What is
| the cash back % on this card, and do they have effectively a
| revolving loan, like my Amex and Chase cards?
| corkill wrote:
| 1.5% cash back.
|
| The difference with Ramp is they are connected to your business
| bank account and can automatically increase your limit as you
| grow vs traditional companies like AMEX that require you to
| manually submit your financials and go through review etc. Also
| just in general better UI/UX and support etc.
|
| We moved to Ramp as AMEX was unable to scale our limit fast
| enough.
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(page generated 2021-08-24 23:01 UTC)