In today’s cashless society, corporate credit cards have become an indispensable tool for businesses to manage expenses and streamline financial procedures. Nonetheless, lacking proper supervision and control mechanisms, they can quickly become a liability for organizations. To ensure the efficient handling of corporate credit cards, it is imperative to implement optimal strategies and leverage sophisticated solutions such as corporate credit card management software. In this article, we will dive into five preeminent corporate credit card management best practices that will enable your organization to maintain governance, mitigate risks, and optimize financial operations.
1. Establish clearly defined corporate credit card policies
Formulating well-articulated policies governing the use of corporate credit cards serves as the bedrock of effective management. These policies should include comprehensive guidelines on permissible expenditures, predefined spending thresholds, and authorized card utilization protocols. Once policies are defined, and clear expectations are communicated, both the employees and the administration have the guidelines necessary to make good financial decisions. Having specific rules in place will counter-intuitively improve the employees’ experience while instantly reducing credit card misuse and fraudulent activity. It is genuinely a “win-win” for everyone. Finally, it is essential to regularly disseminate the policy across the business and equally important to offer continuous training sessions to ensure that everyone is aware of and understands their respective responsibilities.
2. Put approval workflows in place
To maintain control over corporate credit card spending, it is essential to establish well-defined workflows. Having a structured approval process ensures that expenses are authorized by relevant stakeholders before they are incurred. This step aids in preventing unauthorized or unnecessary spending, improves budget adherence, and reduces financial risks.
Leveraging corporate credit card management software to automate approval workflows will streamline processes and maintain an audit trail with enhanced transparency. For example, Docyt customers can set up roles and permissions within the platform to control who can approve business spending or submit credit card expenses to minimize the risk of fraud.
3. Regularly monitor and audit spend
Monitoring and auditing credit card transactions play significant roles in effectively managing corporate credit cards. It is important to regularly review expense reports, receipts, and transaction records for any anomalies, policy violations, or potential fraud. Corporate credit card management software simplifies this task by providing real-time transaction visibility, generating automated reports, and flagging suspicious activities. Taking immediate action based on these audits ensures compliance and minimizes financial risks.
4. Educate employees about responsible credit card use
Proper training and education on managing corporate credit cards are essential to promote responsible credit card use among employees. Communicate the significance of adhering to company policies regarding credit card use, emphasize the consequences of non-compliance, and provide guidelines for appropriate spending habits. Encourage employees to promptly report lost or stolen cards to help minimize potential liabilities. Cultivating a sense of responsibility within the organization maximizes the advantages of corporate credit cards while reducing associated risks.
5. Leverage corporate credit card management software
Managing and tracking all expenses, including credit card transactions, is time-consuming and tedious, especially as any business scales. This comes with larger volumes of expenses to handle. Handling this manually takes a lot of effort to track and review every line item. That’s where corporate credit card management software comes in to help businesses automate their workflows through using tools like receipt capture and real-time credit card tracking and reporting. By leveraging this technology, you will improve control measures at speed to keep up with business growth, reduce manual errors, and gain access to valuable insight into spending patterns and trends so you have visibility into where to save or spend.
There are a lot of solutions in the market today, so looking for the right solution that aligns with your organization’s unique needs and integrates seamlessly with your existing financial system is important to keep in mind.
Optimize these best practices with Docyt
Effectively managing corporate credit card expenses can be done successfully by implementing these tried and true best-practice strategies:
- Clearly define credit card policies
- Mandate and standardize approval workflows
- Regularly monitor spend and processes
- Develop a comprehensive employee training program
- Deploy credit card management software
In summary, following these best practices will create significantly stronger control measures yielding better compliance, amplifying financial efficiencies, and is overall a positive contribution to the underlining success of the business.
Docyt helps businesses track and manage credit card spend, and its powerful AI technology performs real-time accounting. Because Docyt’s AI performs these workflows in real-time, this means that any time a credit card expense is submitted into the system, Docyt will automatically review, extract the relevant data of that expense receipt, audit it against your bank and credit card feeds and identify if the transaction is fraudulent, missing, require human review, or good to go. This saves the business owners time reviewing and cross-checking credit card expenses. Business owners are provided with real-time financial reports on their expenses so they have visibility on spending risks and opportunities.
Ready to learn more about how Docyt makes corporate card spend management easy? Book a demo today.
