Getting started

Introduction

What Ramp exposes to AI agents and which surface to start with.

Ramp gives AI agents a permissioned way to work with your finance data and payment workflows. Use it when you want an assistant to answer spend questions, inspect cards and funds, reason over policies, or generate constrained Agent Card credentials for a purchase.

Agents reach Ramp through two primary surfaces:

  • Ramp MCP for conversational assistants and IDE agents that speak the Model Context Protocol.
  • Ramp CLI for terminal agents, coding agents, scripts, and packaged skills.

Both authenticate through Ramp OAuth and act with the permissions of the user who connected them. If a tool writes to Ramp, that write is attributed and audited.

Choose a surface

MCPRamp CLI
Best forClaude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Perplexity, and other MCP clientsClaude Code, Cursor CLI, coding agents, CI, scripts, and remote hosts
SetupAdd https://mcp.ramp.com/mcp to the client and authorize in a browserInstall ramp, run ramp auth login, then call commands or skills
ShapeThe assistant chooses tools during conversationThe agent runs explicit commands and can parse JSON output
Use demo dataSwap in https://demo-mcp.ramp.com/mcpUse Sandbox unless you pass --env production

Most people start with MCP because it is the fastest path inside an assistant. Use the CLI when the agent already has shell access, needs repeatable command output, or should follow a packaged workflow like agentic-purchase.

What is live today

  • Spend and account context — transactions, cards, funds, vendors, departments, entities, accounting categories, treasury balances, trips, and related Ramp objects according to your permissions.
  • Policy and help — answers about expense policy, spend limits, fund restrictions, decline reasons, and Ramp help content.
  • Agent Cards — single-use card credentials through ramp_get_agent_card_creds or the CLI agentic-purchase skill when your business is enrolled and the user has the right access.
  • CLI workflows — terminal commands, JSON output for agents, and installable skills that package multi-step Ramp workflows.

The exact MCP tool list is generated from production and can change as Ramp ships new tools. Use the MCP tools reference for exact tool names, and use this section for the product-level map.

Where to go next