---
title: "A Fall Internship at Ramp: Improving Reimbursements"
description: "During a fall internship at Ramp, a backend software engineering intern worked on the reimbursements team and describes projects that improved reimbursement flows while providing full-stack experience. One early change clarified multi-currency mileage reimbursements by showing both the expense currency and the payout currency, while later work overhauled mileage support with live navigation storage, frequent-trip recommendations, commute deductions, and automatic e-receipts. The post also discusses using LLMs to predict merchant categories from receipt text, enhancing merchant matching, and adding monitoring and alerts for OCR categorization errors. The reflection emphasizes measuring feature usage and outcomes, writing and revising specifications before implementation, leaving reusable code, and using Ramp’s transparent documentation and collaborative support. The internship concluded with a return to the University of Waterloo planned for 2025."
---

# A Fall Internship at Ramp: Improving Reimbursements

[Ramp](https://yomu.fyi/company/ramp) · Sat Arora · Apr 3, 2025

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

During a fall internship at Ramp, a backend software engineering intern worked on the reimbursements team and describes projects that improved reimbursement flows while providing full-stack experience. One early change clarified multi-currency mileage reimbursements by showing both the expense currency and the payout currency, while later work overhauled mileage support with live navigation storage, frequent-trip recommendations, commute deductions, and automatic e-receipts. The post also discusses using LLMs to predict merchant categories from receipt text, enhancing merchant matching, and adding monitoring and alerts for OCR categorization errors. The reflection emphasizes measuring feature usage and outcomes, writing and revising specifications before implementation, leaving reusable code, and using Ramp’s transparent documentation and collaborative support. The internship concluded with a return to the University of Waterloo planned for 2025.

## Context

Reimbursements are described as one of Ramp’s biggest sources of traffic, creating opportunities to build features and refine existing flows. The work addressed unclear currency handling, mileage reimbursement limitations, receipt categorization, and the need to measure feature behavior and results.

## Approach / What changed

The intern improved currency presentation, expanded mileage reimbursement capabilities, considered LLM-based merchant categorization, enhanced merchant matching, added OCR monitoring and alerts, and followed a specification-driven development process with feedback and measurement.

## Takeaways

- Multi-currency mileage reimbursements were improved to show both what employees are reimbursing for and what they will be paid, such as CAD expenses and USD payouts.
- The mileage reimbursement overhaul added live navigation storage, frequent-trip recommendations based on the previous three months, personal-commute deductions, and automatically generated e-receipts.
- The reflection advocates defining metrics and success measures, monitoring logs and outcomes, and iterating on written technical specifications before implementing features.

**Tags:** [Data Quality](https://yomu.fyi/topic/data-quality), [LLMs](https://yomu.fyi/topic/llm), [Monitoring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/monitoring)

- Source: [Ramp](https://builders.ramp.com/post/sat-fall-internship)
- Source URL: https://builders.ramp.com/post/sat-fall-internship
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-01T01:34:28.837Z

[Read original post](https://builders.ramp.com/post/sat-fall-internship)