Corporate cards and p-cards are typically reserved for executives, department heads, and frequent business travelers. Moreover, they’ve lived in a silo that makes card transactions challenging to control and tedious to move through the accounting cycle.
But times have changed.
Integrating these payment methods with a flexible expense management solution is the key to more modern spending because it gives you the power to proactively control spend, closely track budgets in real-time, and quickly reconcile transactions. It’s the alignment you need to optimize your cash flow while ensuring accurate, timely bookkeeping.
As organizations continue to embrace digital processes and distributed teams, here are the top financial, operational, and security reasons to uplevel your corporate and p-card usage into a modern, integrated program:
1. It streamlines routine and repetitive processes
The average expense report takes 20 minutes to complete and costs $58 in employee time to process, and that’s assuming there are no errors or missing information — something that happens all too frequently.
Integrated corporate cards and p-cards give you all of that time back. Admins and managers use their expense management system to issue pre-configured cards for authorized and budgeted spend. Then, when a purchase is made, the system automatically applies relevant policies, budget limits, approval routing rules, and business purposes and reconciles transactions immediately. It then exports the data to your ERP or accounting system, allowing you to close the books quickly and effortlessly.
Virtual cards are flexible and easy to issue, so assign them to individuals, projects, or specific transactions. For example, give one to your marketing manager so she can pay recurring monthly expenses, like your company’s email platform subscription or digital ad spend. This may seem like a small change, but it can have a big impact. According to our 2023 Spend Management Trends Report, 51% of companies said their most frustrating spend management processes related to high-volume/low-cost recurring expenses, like supplies, software, and advertising.
2. It reduces waste, overspending, and the risk of fraud
Up to 5% of revenue — that’s how much companies can lose from fraud every year. When you must make countless transactions to run your organization, fraud risks increase considerably without stringent compliance controls. Personal card usage and traditional corporate cards lack proactive policy enforcement, which means non-compliant and over-budget spending is only discovered after you receive a reimbursement request or card statement.
On the other hand, integrated corporate cards and p-cards make it easy to implement the strictest of controls, including purchase categories, transaction/total amount, time, and approved vendors. These controls are applied systematically at the point of purchase, allowing you to protect your bottom line by preventing unauthorized and out-of-policy spending before it happens.
Cards also bring enhanced security to your vendor payments. Unlike ACH transfers and checks, virtual cards remove the need to expose bank account and routing numbers. In the case of a breach, built-in controls prevent bad actors from using virtual cards for any transaction other than their configured purpose.
3. It adds up to more cash rebates
The most visible benefit of corporate cards is the potential cash rebate on purchases, which typically varies from 1-5%. While organizations are happy to get rebates for spending on travel, hotels, and meals, these expenses typically only account for 10-15% of most organizations’ budgets.
Want to see your rebates go up? Use your integrated card system instead of checks or ACH/wire transfers for other operating expenses. Hardware, telecommunications, software/data subscriptions, digital advertising, supplies, and raw materials can all be prime sources of rebate revenue. As an added benefit, moving large and recurring purchases to your new system will eliminate transaction-related costs, which puts even more money back in your organization’s pocket.
4. It drives faster, better-informed decisions
Waiting for expense reports, and then manually processing transactions can push your financial close back several weeks. Not only is this inefficient, it forces your organization to sit around and wait for critical data, stalling important business decisions. Every day you miss out on comprehensive spend visibility, you don’t fully understand your organization’s financial health. For all you know, your company may be improperly allocating funds, generating flawed margin calculations, or even budgeting what has already been spent.
Without an integrated expense solution, you’re stuck with the manual tasks of sourcing data from various systems, normalizing it, and finally distilling it to stakeholders. Moving to an integrated system gives you an immediate, birds-eye view of larger trends and real-time granular details about specific purchases — which gives you the power to make faster, smarter decisions about your cash flow management.
5. It increases employee satisfaction
Team morale should never be an afterthought. Expenses for employees who only travel sparingly can still add up quickly, and forcing your team to front the money on their cards can be frustrating at best and, at worst, a downright hardship. Those bad feelings get even worse in organizations that only run one or two expense reimbursements per month.
Integrating virtual cards makes it quick and easy for all employees to submit and process expenses and invoices. Automation throughout your expense management solution speeds up cycle times, significantly decreasing administrative overhead and menial tasks.
A less tangible but often equally important benefit of providing corporate cards to employees is its message — that the company trusts and cares about them. In an era where employee happiness is an especially high priority for many organizations, this is a key reason to consider adopting a more modern card program.
Turning your purchasing into a strategic asset isn’t hard. Learn how Emburse’s virtual cards and vendor payment programs give you real-time, end-to-end control over your organization’s spending.