Ramp or Brex for a Solar EPC Running Concurrent Projects

The mistake most EPCs make is running the first few months of a project's spend through a general company card and planning to sort out the site attribution later, once things settle down. They don't settle down, and by the time someone tries to reconstruct which permitting fee belonged to which site, the receipts are scattered across whoever happened to be holding the card that week. Issue a project-specific card, or at minimum a project-specific cost code, before the first application fee goes out, not after the first project closes and the pattern is already set.

A racking or major equipment deposit on a commercial installation can run well past a standard card's default limit, and a platform that requires a manual limit-increase request for every large prepay slows down a project timeline that's already tight against an interconnection queue. This is where Brex tends to fit better, since its limits track a company's cash position rather than a flat cap, which matters when a deposit needs to clear same-day to hold a delivery slot with a supplier.

Federal and state incentive programs, along with tax equity investors, can request documentation on a project years after it's placed in service, and a receipt that's coded to the wrong project or missing a vendor name is a real problem at that point, not a minor inconvenience. Require every project-tagged transaction to carry the project's name or number in the memo field at the time of purchase, since reconstructing that attribution from a bank statement alone, long after the fact, is close to impossible.

Ramp's automated matching suits the steadier, more predictable side of project spend: design software subscriptions, small permitting-adjacent fees, and recurring vendor bills that repeat across every project you run. If most of your transaction volume is this kind of recurring, moderate-dollar spend rather than large one-time deposits, Ramp keeps it coded without much manual review.

Start with your next new project rather than trying to retrofit a card structure onto projects already underway. Set up the project cost code, issue the project card, and require the memo-field discipline from day one on that single project. Once it closes clean and the documentation held up, apply the same structure to the next project you open, rather than rolling every active project onto a new system simultaneously and losing track of which project is on the old process and which is on the new one.

Follow this sequence when you introduce project cards:

1. Pick your next new project as the pilot, rather than retrofitting a card structure onto projects that are already underway.
2. Create the project cost code and issue the project card before the first permitting fee is paid.
3. Require the project name or number in the memo field on every transaction from the first day.
4. Confirm at project close that the documentation held up, then repeat the same structure on the next project you open.

If your project managers or engineers travel to remote installation sites for inspections, commissioning or utility meetings, Navan folds that travel booking into the same card program as project spend, which keeps a flight and hotel charge tagged to the same project as the permitting fees and equipment deposits around it. This helps most if site visits happen often across a spread-out project pipeline, and matters less if your projects sit close together in one region where a day trip covers most travel needs.

The most common failure isn't a platform limitation, it's a project manager splitting time across two active projects in the same week and coding a shared purchase, like a bulk equipment order that serves both sites, entirely to whichever project comes to mind first. That single miscoded transaction can throw off both projects' documentation enough to cause a real problem at incentive filing time.

Set a hard rule for split purchases: any single transaction covering more than one project gets divided across project codes at the time of purchase, with the allocation logic noted in the memo field, rather than left as a judgment call for whoever reviews the books months later.