At times, employees need to cover urgent business expenses, such as travel costs or purchasing supplies, out of their own pockets, only to seek reimbursement later. However, even though it may seem like a simple method, it presents multiple challenges for expense management. From the employees’ point of view, this procedure involves covering the expense, managing receipts, and then waiting for reimbursement, which can take multiple weeks. This often leads to the procedure resulting in errors and increasing the likelihood of duplicate submissions or lost receipts.
For any business, managing such reimbursements comes with a labour-intensive task. This is where corporate cards step in to simplify expense management for businesses.
Corporate Cards For Business Expense Management:
Employees of a particular company use corporate cards for payment of business-related expenses. Companies deploy these cards by distributing them to authorised personnel, setting specific spending limits and budgets, and integrating them with their expense management systems for real-time oversight and tracking. Here are the primary reasons why every business should utilise corporate cards for expense management.
- Fulfil agile needs
Corporate cards for businesses offer a versatile solution, providing both virtual and physical cards. These cards can be customised according to the unique needs of the business, such as zero balance or single-use cards, ensuring accurate expenditure control. Moreover, by using cards like an Aspire debit card, employees can perform transactions, with each transaction recorded, promoting accountability.
- Customised spending controls
With a corporate card for employees, businesses customise the spending limits for each employee, according to their specific corporate card policies. Since the very beginning, businesses can establish budget limitations, control which merchants employees can spend at, and the types of expenses they can cover, using the card and other payment categories. This robust control over the corporate card provided to employees by a particular business enables the business owner to effectively leverage internal policies and implement spending limits directly through the card, thereby reducing the need for manual interference.
Additionally, businesses can assign vendor-specific cards that allow employees to purchase only from designated vendors. Moreover, by setting a particular expense category, businesses can prevent the misuse of these cards by employees, such as limiting the usage of a card to a particular gas station. With this clear and targeted approach, businesses can ensure that expenses are well-aligned with the company’s objectives, while also boosting control over spending.
- Enhanced accountability
In comparison to business credit cards, which require businesses to wait until the end of the month to receive statements and spending insights, corporate cards assigned individually to employees come with a dedicated budget for each employee. This service provides real-time visibility into each transaction, enabling businesses to track every expenditure. This extreme transparency simplifies the expense tracking method and promotes the smooth resolution of any discrepancies.
- Real-time visibility
Corporate cards reduce the need to wait till the end of the month to get an overview of the spending. Rather, these cards provide real-time visibility, allowing businesses to track each expense as soon as it is incurred. With this immediate transaction update, businesses can monitor and track budgeting and compliance management, preventing any unexpected, lengthy bills at the end of each month.
- Better employee experience
Corporate cards have revolutionised expense management for businesses, taking employees from the inconvenience of cash handling and reimbursement to easy and digital business expense management. By using a dedicated corporate card for each employee, businesses can avoid draining employee funds to manage business workflow.
- Rewards and cashback
Corporate cards often come with multiple incentives, including cashback, rewards, vouchers, and redeemable points. These benefits offered by a corporate card company might differ from one to another. Some companies may offer rewards for each transaction, while others may provide a reward upon reaching a certain pending limit.
Conclusion:
Businesses can provide corporate cards to employees to manage both local and international transactions, making them a perfect tool for business-related spending. These cards support multiple currencies worldwide, eliminating hassle in currency conversion and simplifying cross-border payments. Hence, a corporate card stands as the most useful tool for businesses to ease the process of expense management, along with accurate tracking, management and robust control over each card assigned to employees.
