Ramp opens finance platform to Canadian businesses

Ramp has opened its finance platform to businesses headquartered in Canada, following a limited rollout to a small number of customers.

Any business based in Canada can now use Ramp's products for spend management, bill payments and accounting close, although the service is not yet available to businesses in Quebec or Saskatchewan.

The launch marks a broader push beyond Ramp's home market in the United States, where it has built a customer base of more than 70,000 organisations. Canadian users can access corporate cards in both Canadian and US dollars, along with expense management, employee reimbursements, bill payments and accounting software integrations.

Canadian finance teams often have to manage domestic and cross-border transactions at the same time, while also dealing with different provincial sales taxes and supplier relationships in both countries. Ramp's local version is designed to handle goods and services tax, harmonised sales tax, provincial sales tax and Quebec sales tax, with tax coding linked to accounting systems.

It also supports electronic funds transfers for bill payments and employee reimbursements to Canadian bank accounts. For bank connections, Ramp works with Plaid and supports major Canadian banks including RBC, BMO, TD, CIBC, Scotiabank, Desjardins, EQ Bank and Wealthsimple.

Ramp's Canadian accounting integrations include QuickBooks Online, Xero, Microsoft Business Central, NetSuite and Sage Intacct. It also offers CSV exports for other enterprise resource planning systems.

Local expansion

Ramp will also open a Toronto office as it builds out a local team. The office is intended to support customer service and product development for the Canadian market.

The expansion comes as finance software providers compete to tailor products to local tax rules, currencies and payment networks, rather than adapting US products with only limited regional changes. For Canadian companies operating in the US, managing both CAD and USD transactions without relying on multiple systems has become a key issue for finance departments.

Justin Dourado, Director of Finance at Othership, described the platform's appeal for a business operating across the border.

"We weren't trying to retrofit an old finance system. We had a blank canvas. As a Canadian company growing quickly in the U.S., Ramp gave us the scalable foundation to build the finance function of the future," Dourado said.

Ramp was founded in 2019 and says it handles more than USD $200 billion in purchases each year. Based on its own calculations, customers have saved more than USD $12 billion and 27 million hours through the platform.

Ramp also said the median customer cuts expenses by 5% and grows revenue by 16% in its first year, though it noted those figures are based on internal analysis of customer data and are not guarantees of results.

The Canadian launch will test whether finance software groups can gain market share by offering more localised products in markets where tax treatment and banking practices differ sharply from the US. Canadian businesses can now use Ramp's platform to manage cards, expenses and bill payments in one system.