When conducting crucial processes for the business – such as spend management, for example – your finance team need to have the most accurate and efficient methods in place, to expertly analyze corporate spend.
Therefore, it’s important to provide them with the best business tools for the job.
With this in mind, join us as we discuss the use of virtual cards in your business, as well as the benefits of virtual cards for your finance team.
What are virtual cards?
Virtual cards are company credit cards that can be used by any member of the company, for a wide range of payments and transactions. Put simply, they operate almost identically to the standard credit cards you’re familiar with, except they’re virtual.
With a standard credit card, you’d keep the physical card in your wallet or other compartment, and use it for payments. With virtual cards, the cards are kept in your digital wallet – an application you store on your mobile device.
In this digital wallet, you can access all your virtual cards and many other features – viewing recent transactions, viewing the balance, topping up the cards, cancelling the cards, etc.
Your virtual cards can make payments in-store, online, over the phone, and essentially anywhere else a standard credit card would work – except automated teller machines (ATMs).
Also, your finance team can not only benefit from virtual cards, but expert spend management software as well. This allows you to store your cards in a digital wallet and adds a range of intricate features to improve how these cards are viewed, monitored, and controlled.
How can virtual cards benefit your finance team?
Virtual cards can be an excellent tool for your finance team, due to the wide variety of benefits they provide, including:
- Full visibility on company transactions
Virtual credit cards can give your finance team instant and full visibility for your entire corporate spend.
With the right spend management software to accompany it, your team will be able to see every transaction that takes place on any card, throughout every area of the business.
After each payment is made, the software will log the data in real-time, so your team will always have a full picture of company spend, without any payment data being delayed or missed.
As well as this, the software provides all the data on a clear and centralized platform. That way, any data or features your team need to access can be easily found and used, and they can tailor the data to be organized and displayed in the best way that suits them.
With every aspect of your virtual cards working efficiently to produce clear, instant and organized data, your finance team will receive a significant boost to all their important company processes.
- Insights for your entire corporate spend
Another major benefit virtual cards provide for your finance team, is that when you pair them with expert spend management software, you can receive meaningful insights surrounding every payment.
In many companies, there are a mountain of transactions taking place on a daily basis. Therefore, it can be a challenge to ensure each of these payments are as cost-efficient for the business as possible.
Your software will be able to give your team key insights into the corporate spend through virtual cards.
One example of these insights, is that your team will receive information regarding any cheaper alternatives to certain card payments. For instance, this could be a software that a certain area of the business is using, where there’s a cheaper software to fulfil the same role.
With these constant insights into corporate spend, your finance team will be able to refine every area of your spending, to ensure the company is always striving for optimized cost-efficiency with every transaction.
