The coronavirus pandemic has significantly impacted the way we live and work. Over the past two weeks, Emburse - like many other companies around the world - has had to adapt to the new normal of an entirely remote workforce. The rapid pace of change has forced employers to quickly reassess how to best support their employees, and try to maintain as much business continuity and consistency as possible.
To maintain productivity, many employers are allowing employees to buy office supplies such as monitors and keyboards, and to keep some of the perks of office life going are also offering the ability for employees to expense lunch and other food purchases (if these were provided by the company). As a result, many organizations may see a significant volume of employee expenses related to working from home. At Emburse, we’re trying to help make the transition to working from home as smooth as we can, so we are providing each employee with a controlled spending virtual card that they can use to buy supplies for their home offices.
We’re already seeing organizations start to offer these cards to their employees, including one leading financial services firm that has provided more than 7,000 of them to its portfolio companies’ employees.
We’d like to share what we’ve done in hopes it can also help you and your organization during this challenging time. Given the need for these initiatives to be up and running as soon as possible, getting your team members quickly on board can’t be a long or complex process. That’s why we’ve set up a couple of packages that can help organizations keep their employees as connected as possible until we’re back to a pre-crisis operational mode.
First is the Work from Home Starter Card package. This allows employers to provide policy-backed Emburse cards to their employees with no fees. It’s perfect for any organization, regardless of size or expense platform.
Virtual cards can be issued immediately from a central dashboard. Employers can limit spend based on their work from home processes. For example, if they are used for lunches, purchases can be restricted to food/grocery purchases, and can also incorporate spend and time restrictions, such as $20 per day only on weekdays. Similarly, purchases of monitors or other office supplies can be limited to stores such as Office Depot or Staples.
Our second package is the Work from Home Expense Management Starter Plan. This is tailored for organizations who need a rapid deployment of an expense platform to manage all the new employees and contractors working remotely. This incorporates both Emburse cards for payments, and also the Abacus real-time expense management system.
Through Abacus, employers can also reimburse for additional expenses, such as mobile phone or home internet bills. Administrators can establish policies within Abacus - such as $100 monthly home internet allowance - to be automatically approved for reimbursement.
This solution can be up and running in as little as 48 hours, and we’ll help you along the way to set it up. There are no limits on the number of users or cards issued. We’re waiving fees for the first 60 days to help organizations make this transition as smooth as possible. There is no commitment beyond the initial 60-day period for either of these solutions, and the Work from Home Starter Card package is always free.