Client

![Ramp logo dark](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jldqsjg6/production/65e7d22da934809392512964391a53d9d34df119-96x26.svg)

# Global tax compliance, on both sides of the ledger.

Client

![Ramp logo dark](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jldqsjg6/production/65e7d22da934809392512964391a53d9d34df119-96x26.svg)

Industry

[Finance](/customers/region/finance-industry)

Products

[Input Tax](/input-tax)

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![Ramp](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jldqsjg6/production/bc11469357f18ca00352898c7dd2b08c4da07892-1536x1024.png?q=80&fit=max&auto=format&w=3840)

Problem

As Ramp's customers expanded internationally, their bottleneck became tax. It was the one piece of expense management still missing, and with nearly half the customer base transacting across more than 180 countries every week, that gap was costing them time. Tax had stopped being a next-year problem: the urgency arrived faster than the tooling market did.

-   **Tax complexity increased across a growing book of customers:** as they expanded internationally, Ramp customers were hitting VAT deductibility in the UK, invoice compliance in Canada, and challenges with individual line items being taxed differently in every jurisdiction. Customers brought those questions to Ramp, who needed one comprehensive, white-label answer it could put in front of every customer, whatever their size, wherever they transacted.
-   **Recoverable tax going unclaimed in the mid-market:** because of huge variability across tax jurisdictions, knowing what portion of the VAT on a hotel bill, a software purchase or a client dinner is recoverable has traditionally been external advisory work, delivered by hand and billed accordingly. This put recoverability outside of the reach of mid-market businesses, which meant recoverable money simply went unclaimed.
-   **No vendor covering input tax alongside sales tax:** Ramp had the transaction data but not the sheer scale of specialised tax knowledge required to manage the minutiae of possible customer requests. Every vendor Ramp assessed stopped at sales tax, so the input tax half of the problem had nowhere to go and no obvious solution.
-   **Growing faster than a point solution could keep up with:** increasingly global customers were adding entities, markets and regimes faster than a single-purpose tax tool or advisor could absorb. Anything built for the current version of the problem would be out of date by the time it was implemented. Ramp needed a partner that could customize and build at their pace, and the pace of their customer’s growth.

![Ramp logo light](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jldqsjg6/production/e989700fdd21984bc2a7c5bfc04e03cedd14f406-96x26.svg)

> "Sphere was the only choice because they were the only provider who could cover both sides of the ledger, not just sales tax."

![Alejandro Borgonovo](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jldqsjg6/production/a5387fdeb7b1db027ccbce6ae313b43731d70827-1536x1024.png?w=128&h=85&q=80&fit=max&auto=format)

Alejandro Borgonovo

Lead Product Manager

Solution

Sphere’s white-labeled input tax solution sits natively in Ramp's platform, available to every customer whatever their size, wherever they transact. Ramp owns the surface and the customer experience, while Sphere runs underneath as the compliance engine.

Sphere was the only choice because it was uniquely able to cover sales tax and input tax natively in one, integrated system. At a glance:

**A white-label input tax API, with Ramp on the front and Sphere underneath:** Ramp sends structured transaction and invoice data, Sphere returns the determination, while the customer only ever experiences a seamless Ramp journey.

-   Ramp holds the richest data in the flow: the invoices its customers pay, the card transactions they make, the receipts it reads. Sphere adds the tax specialization that turns that data into a determination; which line item is exempt, which sits at a different rate, and what each means for recoverability. Ramp keeps ownership of the product and the customer relationship, with a specialist tax partner running the compliance layer alongside it.

**TRAM, an AI tax engine that reads and codifies tax law at global scale:** Sphere's proprietary engine is what makes covering both sides of the ledger possible. TRAM ensures Ramp’s product stays current as the technology reads and ingests global tax regulation as it changes and is continuously fine-tuned by Sphere's in-house tax team.

-   TRAM reads statute, administrative guidance and case precedent across regions and codifies this into determinations, then it continuously updates as provisions and law change. Every determination is tied back to a legal source with the citation attached, and Sphere's in-house tax team reviews the outputs ensuring accuracy at scale. That combination is what separates a system you can confidently put in front of a customer all the time, from a model that is right only most of the time.

**Real-time determination of what is actually recoverable, netted against sales tax:** resolved on the invoice itself, rather than reconstructed in a reconciliation exercise months later.

-   Every invoice and transaction a customer pays is passed to Sphere line by line. TRAM applies the current rules of the relevant jurisdiction to each line and, since a single bill can carry several different rates and several different recoverability treatments, it returns how much of the tax on each can actually be reclaimed. The answer comes back at the point the invoice lands, so recoverability is a number the customer already has rather than something an advisor works out later.

**Invoice compliance checked as the invoice arrives:** supplier tax ID, mandatory fields and formatting verified in-platform, so recoverability is never lost on a technicality.

-   A reclaim is only valid if the invoice supporting it is. Sphere checks each invoice against the fields the relevant jurisdiction requires, the tax IDs, the mandatory data and the formatting, and validates every supplier's tax ID in real time against its structure, region codes and legal name. Anything blocked or risky is flagged as it arrives, rather than discovered at the point a claim is rejected.

**Real people in a shared Slack channel, not a support queue:** Sphere's engineers and in-house tax specialists work alongside Ramp's team directly, so a build request or a tax question both get answered by the person who owns it.

-   Ramp raises a change in Slack or on a call, whether that is an invoicing requirement, a customization for a specific customer, or question about a tax edge case, it comes back in hours or days rather than sitting in a queue for weeks. Requests that reshaped the API were agreed on the call rather than filed into a roadmap, and questions that would normally take an advisory firm a week to confirm come back with, Sphere's tax team handles in the same day. Product build and tax move at the same speed because one channel carries both.

![Alejandro Borgonovo](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jldqsjg6/production/a5387fdeb7b1db027ccbce6ae313b43731d70827-1536x1024.png?q=80&fit=max&auto=format&w=3840)

![Ramp logo light](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jldqsjg6/production/e989700fdd21984bc2a7c5bfc04e03cedd14f406-96x26.svg)

> "Our customers came to Ramp to spend less time on finance, not more. Tax shouldn't be the exception."

Alejandro Borgonovo

Lead Product Manager

Results

-   **Both sides of the ledger, from one partner:** sales tax and input tax recovery covered natively in a single system, in place of the two-vendor-plus-spreadsheet arrangement or thousands in advisory fees.
-   **Tax expertise democratized into the mid-market:** determinations that used to be priced as advisory work for the largest companies in the world are delivered in-product instead. A customer with a million dollars of international travel last year can be told, concretely, what portion of it is reclaimable.
-   **Determination in real time, not hours of manual review:** partial recoverability resolved line by line as the invoice lands, instead of being reconstructed by advisors after the fact.
-   **Recoverability protected at the point of entry:** with invoice validation running as invoices are accepted, money is not lost later to a missing field or an unvalidated VAT ID.
-   **Room to keep expanding:** with a partner covering both sides of the ledger internationally, tax stops being the thing that gates where Ramp's customers, and Ramp, can go next.

## **Who Sphere is built for**

Ramp's story shows that Sphere is uniquely built to service businesses on both sides of the ledger, and for platforms that carry other companies' financial operations and need global tax compliance inside their own product rather than beside it. If you are building for customers who transact across borders, and the tax layer is the piece you cannot credibly build yourself and cannot find covered end to end on the market, Sphere is the engine underneath that you need.

The same applies to the finance teams on the other end of it. If you are responsible for indirect tax across multiple entities and multiple markets, and you are running one vendor for what you owe, another for what you can recover, and a spreadsheet for everything in between, Sphere is the AI-native tax compliance platform that covers the whole ledger, with real tax experts behind it.

Optional eyebrow

$44B

Valuation

$1B+

Annualized revenue

70K+

Businesses

180

Countries transacted across weekly

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EMEA

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## It shouldn't be your job to understand 190 tax systems.\*It shouldn't be your job to understand 190 tax systems.\*

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