Top 5 Best Practices for Your Corporate Card Spending
If you’re looking to optimize your corporate card spending, there are various things you can consider to help you more accurately outline your business corporate card spending policy, and ensure your company is managing card spending effectively.
In this article, we’ve put together five of the best practices to help you manage corporate card spending.
- Choose the Best Virtual Credit Cards
One of the first, and arguably most important practices for corporate card spending, is to incorporate virtual credit cards in your business.
These are advanced credit cards that work in a similar way to physical credit cards, except they exist digitally – in something known as a digital wallet. This will be installed on your mobile device.
To ensure you choose the best virtual cards, make sure you choose a provider that also offers spend management software. This will enable you to accurately monitor all the transactions from your virtual cards, as well as various other aspects of them, like how much is on each card, who each card is used by, etc.
With the right virtual cards and spend management software, you’ll have the best tools to record, asses, and control every aspect of your corporate card spending.
- Gain Full Visibility on Your Spending
Another essential practice for your corporate card spending, is to ensure you have full visibility on all your card payments.
This is best achieved with your spend management software, which will accurately track every transaction from all your virtual cards, and provide extensive data on each one.
This can include what was purchased, how much the transaction amounted to, and which card was used.
Using this, you’ll have a complete overview of your corporate card spending, and there won’t be a single transaction that’s not tracked and recorded by your finance team – giving a more accurate foundation on which to base your financial goals.
- Implement Spend Controls
With your spend management software, you’ll gain access to a wide range of spend controls, such as the ability to set spend limits on your cards.
This will ensure that any transactions which exceed a specified limit will be prohibited from completing. These limits can be customized how you see fit – e.g., limits for individual cards, cards belonging to certain teams, or every card in the business.
This will help every area of your business stay within their established budgets, and ensure the entire company is aligned in its financial goals.
- Create More Efficient Workflows
It’s also great practice to create more efficient workflows for each of your corporate cards, which can be done with your spend management software.
Your software can help you automate a variety of crucial card spending processes, such as having automated approvals. This means that any payment requests which meet a certain criteria – set by you – can be automatically approved, without any manual input needed.
This can not only help you save time on approving your card payments, but it also allows for card payment data to be collected more efficiently, without any delays. This, therefore, creates a more accurate picture of your corporate card spend.
- Take Advantage of Spend Insights
One other important practice for corporate card spending, is to take advantage of the meaningful insights offered by your spend management software.
This is where your software thoroughly analyzes various aspects of your card payments, and offers suggestions for how you can be more cost-efficient with your spending.
For instance, one of the insights provided will allow you to see any cheaper alternatives for certain card transactions. This could be something such as a cheaper software subscription than what’s already being paid for on the card.
With these insights, you’ll be able to continuously adapt your corporate card spending to stay as cost-efficient as possible.
Make sure you put these five best practices into action, so you and your business can start reaping the benefits of more optimized corporate card spending.
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