Break Free From Old-School Expense Policies With Virtual Cards

Once upon a time, employee expenses were predictable, infrequent, and large enough to warrant the time spent claiming reimbursements. Think client dinners and monthly sales trips. While no one enjoyed filing an expense report, the need was rare enough for companies to get away with a process geared towards finance control rather than employee convenience.

But those days are gone.

Employees are making small, frequent purchases all the time on tools, services, and subscriptions necessary to do their everyday jobs. And they simply don’t have the time for old-school expense processes.

The virtual corporate card (and, more importantly, all the software, analytics, and processes efficiency surrounding a virtual card) is changing all that.

How do you know if your business still operates with an old-school expense process? See if any of these situations sound familiar:

• Your employees have their own corporate credit card — which is great for quick purchases, but you risk ballooning budgets, out-of-policy expenses, and fraud.
• Your team uses a one shared corporate card — which can make it challenging and time-consuming to corral eceipts, not to mention the security risk involved with team members sharing card details.
• Employees are required to foot bills on their personal credit cards, and get reimbursed later — which creates a lot of manual reconciliation for you and an extra burden for your already-busy employees.

Say hello to your solution: virtual cards

A virtual corporate card is just like any other bank-issued corporate credit card or prepaid credit card but with a digital edge. With no physical card involved, virtual cards are the perfect way to simplify and streamline your corporate expense policy.

Here’s how a virtual card works:

1. You issue a card.
2. A unique virtual card gets created, giving your employee instant funding.
3. You set card usage limits, like purchase categories, budget, timeframe, and approved vendors.
4. Your employees use the virtual card online or in person through Apple Pay or Google Pay.
5. All purchase details are recorded in your ERP system at the point of transaction for immediate, automatic reconciliation.

Streamlined and straightforward — which is critical in today’s fast-paced business landscape. Things have changed drastically since corporate credit cards came onto the scene to fund a limited number of authorized purchases, like airfare and fancy client dinners. As employees have moved away from the traditional office setting, their expenses have moved far beyond the previous use cases. Now, remote and hybrid employees are responsible for managing a variety of purchases, such as vendor payments, SaaS subscriptions, digital advertising bills, and home office supply costs.

With an old-school policy, each expense would come with its own separate reconciliation process. But with virtual cards, you have the power to set purchase limits and policy controls upfront, so you don’t have to reconcile anything later — meaning there are never any surprises at the end of the month.

From an oversight perspective, virtual cards are a game changer. In addition to those upfront controls, virtual cards automatically enforce your specific spending policies, so you don’t have to bring in human auditors to keep track of everything. And because everything is digital and automatic, you get real-time visibility into your employee spending with comprehensive data analytics. You can also integrate your virtual card platform with your accounting systems for even faster month-end settlement.

It’s time to ditch the old-school expense policy

Virtual cards give you the power to spend smarter and faster without the risk that comes with old-school corporate card options. Discover how your peers use them to their full potential in our guide, Revolutionizing Employee Spend: The Virtual Corporate Card Advantage.