A Procurement Checklist for MSPs Choosing Ramp or Procurify

Before you pick a tool, confirm you can tell, at a glance, which purchases are for internal operations, ticketing software, your own laptops, and which are being bought for resale to a client with a markup attached. Ramp handles this through card-level tagging and custom fields you can require at the point of spend. Procurify handles it through the requisition itself, since a purchase order can carry a client reference from the start. Either works, but the pitfall is the same either way: if resale purchases aren't tagged the moment they're made, someone has to reconstruct the client relationship from a vendor invoice later, and that's how a markup gets missed or a client gets billed the wrong amount.

Computer services firms, the closest match for an MSP's own cost structure, typically pay their vendors around 63 days after invoice¹, while receivables at the same kind of firm run closer to 77.7 days², meaning the wait to collect from a client is usually longer than the runway a vendor gives you to pay. On a resale purchase, that gap is worse, because you're often paying the hardware or software vendor upfront while waiting on a client's normal invoice cycle to recover it. The pitfall here is treating resale purchases like ordinary overhead instead of short-term financing you're extending to a client. Whichever tool you pick, make sure resale purchases get flagged for expedited invoicing, not folded into the normal monthly cycle.

License renewals are the classic MSP procurement mistake: a technician renews a client's software license a tier higher than needed because it was the default option, or renews a license the client actually canceled last quarter. Procurify's requisition step catches this well, since a renewal above a set threshold needs sign-off before it happens. Ramp catches it differently, through a card limit tight enough that an oversized renewal simply won't go through without someone noticing. The pitfall to avoid either way: don't let renewals auto-process on a saved card with no review, because that's exactly the purchase most likely to be wrong.

MSPs running multiple technician teams sometimes end up with more than one ticketing or remote monitoring subscription active at once, especially after a merger or when a team lead brings a preferred tool from a previous job. Neither Ramp nor Procurify will catch this automatically unless someone is actually reviewing the vendor list. Build a quarterly check into your process regardless of which tool you choose: pull every active software subscription and confirm each one still has an owner and a reason to exist. The pitfall isn't the software cost itself, usually modest, it's the compliance and security risk of a tool nobody remembers is still connected to a client's environment. Put a name against every subscription on the list, and if nobody can say why it's still active, treat that as a reason to cancel it, not a reason to keep paying while someone investigates.

A small MSP doing heavy hardware resale for a handful of enterprise clients needs Procurify's requisition discipline more than a larger MSP running mostly managed services with light resale. Count what fraction of your spend is resale-for-markup versus internal overhead, and let that ratio drive the decision instead of your employee count. An MSP that's mostly recurring managed-service revenue, with resale as an occasional add-on, usually gets more value from Ramp's card controls and a lighter manual check on resale purchases than from a full requisition workflow. Run the count once a quarter rather than assuming it stays constant, since a shift toward more project-based hardware work can change the answer within a year. See Procurify vs Coupa vs Ramp for a look at a third option if neither fits cleanly.

Before you decide, confirm each of these:

• Resale purchases carry a client reference at the moment of spend, through required card fields or the purchase requisition itself.
• Vendor payment terms line up with how long clients take to pay you, so resale purchases are not financed longer than planned.
• License renewals above a set threshold need sign-off, so nobody renews a tier too high or renews a license a client already canceled.
• Someone reviews the vendor list quarterly for duplicate ticketing or remote monitoring subscriptions across technician teams.
• The share of spend that is resale for markup, not your headcount, drives the choice between requisition discipline and card controls.