Walk into most charter operators and ask how expenses work. You'll get some version of the same answer: a shared Amex, a folder of receipts, and a bookkeeper who spends the last week of every month typing numbers off PDFs into the accounting system.
I'm not exaggerating for effect. That's the live setup at operations flying multi-million-dollar aircraft.
So I joined Ramp's partner program. Ramp waived the usual eligibility requirements for the firm, which was a generous start — but the partnership itself isn't the story. What it lets me build is.
The spend side and the books side never talk
Here's the thing about aviation finance. Pilots and crew put fuel, catering, and hotel charges on a card. Somebody back at the office re-keys all of it into the general ledger by hand. Every receipt gets touched at least twice. Every month-end is a scramble.
Ramp fixes the spend side — real card controls, receipt capture at the point of sale, no more expense-report ritual. But on its own, it's just a nicer card.
The real win is wiring Ramp into the system the operator actually closes its books in. And operators don't all close their books in the same place — so the integration can't either.
Two ledgers, one finance stack
There are really two worlds in the shops I work with, and ForIT is wired into both:
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This is where we run our own books, and where Pivot Airlines and Great North close theirs. Ramp spend flows straight into Business Central, coded against the right accounts, and lands in the GL without anyone re-typing it.
- QuickBooks. Plenty of operators — XcelJet among them — run their finances in QuickBooks, not an ERP. Ramp connects there too. WM Aviation's books moved onto QuickBooks earlier this year; the same spend-to-books wiring applies.
That's the point I want to make about ForIT: we're not a "we resell one card" shop. We sit across the whole finance and ERP stack — Business Central, Ramp, and QuickBooks — and make the spend side and the books side actually talk, whichever ledger you close in.
XcelJet is the honest example here. They fly hard, they close their books in QuickBooks, and their expense process looks exactly like the one I described at the top. That's not a knock — it's the default state of the industry. It's also precisely the setup this is built to fix.
The honest part
Full disclosure: this isn't free magic. Somebody has to map the chart of accounts, set the coding rules, and own the integration when Ramp, Business Central, or QuickBooks ships an update. That's the part I do. The card is the easy twenty percent.
And we put ForIT's own books on it first — our expenses on Ramp, wired to our own Business Central — before rolling it to anyone else. I'm not going to sell an operator a setup I haven't run myself.
Who this is for
If you're a charter operator still closing the month by hand, re-keying spend into QuickBooks or an ERP, this is worth a conversation.
If your finance process already works and you just want a different card, you don't need me for that. Ramp's website has a signup button.
Benjamin Thomas
ForIT Team
