Coding Expenses/Reimbursements to QBO Product & Services
We're a startup CM/GC, on Ramp since October. Overall it's worked well — a few sync errors, but manageable.
Our stack:
- Autodesk Forma — project management and day-to-day project budgets
- QuickBooks Online — back-end accounting
- Ramp — expenses and bill pay
We recently turned on the Autodesk ↔ QBO integration, which shuffles costs between the two. Our budgets use CSI Masterformat — about 1,000 possible line items, of which any given project uses 40–150. Those live in QBO as Products & Services (not the Chart of Accounts) since they roll up to ~5 COA lines and would otherwise pollute the COA.
Before the integration, we just coded credit card and reimbursement expenses to a COA line, then manually re-allocated them to the right CSI code in Autodesk each month. With the integration live, expenses need to be coded directly to a Product & Service.
We can do this in Bill Pay, but not in Expenses. Ramp support told me today they don't think it's possible and are looking into it. That makes no sense to me:
- It's the same coding mechanic as picking any other line item.
- Ramp already lets us add "CSI Code" as an accounting field — and literally prompts us to require it — but then won't actually let us require it (see screenshot).
Anyone else running Ramp + QBO Products & Services this way? Is there a workaround I'm missing?
If not and we are required to manually allocated these Ramp becomes essentially useless for expense management.
