Say Goodbye to Year-End Headaches With Automated Expense Software

It’s that time of year again! Everyone’s getting in the festive spirit, with no shortage of holiday office parties, dinners and team activities. 🎄 Then comes year-end ruining all the fun. 😑 It’s no secret that closing the fiscal year is always a hectic time for finance and accounting teams. And it doesn’t help that most companies are leading with outdated and inefficient processes that only cause further delays and headaches. 

Luckily, things don’t have to go on this way. Think of automated expense software as the Tylenol to your year-end headaches. 💊 It simplifies your year-end by eliminating expense reports, automating reconciliation, tracking purchases and receipts in real-time, streamlining spending approvals and requests and more. It also gives financial teams quick access to financial reporting for better business planning and decision-making. ✅

Leave manual reports in 2021 👋

Manual expense reports are a waste of valuable time and money, especially this time of year. They’re prone to human error and can potentially compromise the accuracy of critical financial data in your annual reporting. These outdated processes not only take long but they can impact your credibility with key stakeholders like investors or your board of directors.

Automating year-end processes not only reduces these risks, but it eliminates expense reports altogether. Finance and accounting teams can verify data, record and manage invoices and receipts and generate real-time reporting with speed and accuracy. It also minimizes all of the back and forth with employees and teams, cutting all those long hours and late nights at your desktop. 😴

Stay organized all year round 🗓

With the holidays coming close and employees likely taking time off, year end is not the time to be chasing people down for receipts. Automated expense software helps companies better control and manage spending 24-7-365 so that year-end isn’t a massive pile of paperwork and receipts. It introduces a more proactive approach to corporate spending with features that streamline key processes on your year-end to-do list:

  • Reconcile your books in a flash ⚡️
  • Track business purchases in real time 💸
  • Create simple financial policies for all employees to follow 🙌🏾
  • Instantly notify employees to submit receipts when they spend 🧾
  • Set spending limits and approve spend requests in seconds 👍🏼
  • Collect and review key financial data all in one place 👀

This keeps internal teams, financial controllers and management all aligned and organized at any point of the financial year, with no guesswork and zero stress. 

Separate business and personal with virtual cards 👏

Blurring the lines between personal and business expenses is a common mistake many businesses make – with the consequences often creeping in at annual close. 🤯 When employees use their personal credit cards for business purchases, this can make it 10x harder to track and control spending. We know that your average Canadian bank makes it even more difficult to issue corporate cards, which is why so many of us turn to our personal cards to make purchases. Good news, we have a loophole! 😉

Fully integrated with your automated expense software, virtual cards like ours at Float make it easier for businesses to issue credit cards to employees in less than a week, removing personal credit from the equation entirely. With access to virtual cards, employees have greater autonomy and more power to make responsive decisions for the business without jumping through various hoops for approval. 

End the year strong with Float 🤩

If you’re still doing things the old-fashioned way, it’s likely that your finance and accounting teams are approaching year-end feeling overworked. Well guess what, Float can help! Our automated expense software and virtual cards make it a whole lot easier to close the year without your finance team burning out. 

Float fosters a strategic partnership between finance teams and the rest of the organization by making it easy to create and follow financial policies and stay organized daily so that year-end headaches are a thing of the past. 

To learn more about how Float can help you close the year, book a demo today!

Holiday Spending with Float

Keeping the spirit alive with distributed teams

As we get ready to wrap up 2021, there’s no better time than now to celebrate! With most teams distributed across the globe and traditional offices still largely vacant, companies are in need of innovative tools to thrive in this new environment. This holiday season, Float wants to spread cheer by making it easier for organizations to spend smarter, work better and celebrate the season regardless of where they are!

Have more fun this holiday season with Float

Whether you’re a startup with a five-person team or an organization with global teams, spreading holiday cheer has never been easier. Float’s spend management feature will simplify your finance team’s workflow during a hectic year-end so that you can have more fun and less stress! 

1. Deck the halls with zero admin work

Looking to make things more festive in the office this holiday season? Give your employees their own Float card to have some fun and decorate the office! But don’t worry, Float allows you to set clear limits so your team stays on budget as they deck the halls. You can even use our mobile receipt capture feature so everyone can save their receipts just seconds after they spend in-store. 🧾

2. Organize a ‘Secret Santa’ that everyone wants in on

Get the entire organization into the holiday spirit and organize a company-wide Secret Santa exchange. Use Float to issue virtual cards to all of your employees so they can easily purchase gifts with no muss and no fuss. With our new team management feature, only finance managers can see Santa’s secret list – you don’t have to worry about anyone peeking at each other’s receipts! 👀


3. Manage travel expenses with multi-level approvals

For distributed teams planning a holiday party, you can manage spending for those who are flying, driving or riding the train to attend the event. 🙋🏼‍♂️🧳 With Float’s multi-level spend management feature, you can empower employees and create spending rules based on category and amount. For example:

  • $10 meal in an airport? 🥗  No approval is needed. 
  • Need an extra night in the hotel? 💤  Submit a request to your manager.
  • Want to rent a car to get to the holiday party in Montreal? 🚘 The CEO needs to weigh in.

4. Mix your way into merriness

Bartending or mixology events are a great way to bring employees together and teach a new skill that they can use during their own holiday celebrations.🍸 Use Float’s virtual cards to distribute funds for employees to shop for ingredients! You can set a clear spending limit so your teams stay within budget and circumvent anyone from accidentally buying that luxe 50-year-old scotch! 🥃

Happy holidays from Float!

At Float, we have loads of fun building our platform together and enjoy spending time with each other, both during and after work hours. We recently came together to decorate our Toronto workspace with our team members who live in the city. Check out the video below to see how we got into the holiday spirit as a team! 🎄

Is your organization a distributed team as well? We’ll be releasing more tips and showcasing our own online holiday event later in December with Floaters from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. Stay tuned! 

Announcing Float’s US$30M Series A Financing

Float closes US$30M Series A Financing

We’re excited to announce that Float has closed US$30M in Series A financing led by Tiger Global. This new round of capital will help us further invest in our goal of creating Canada’s best corporate card and all-in-one spend management software. 

Thanks to our loyal and supportive customers, Float is now one of the fastest-growing companies in Canada. Since our public launch earlier this year, we’ve seen hundreds of companies adopt Float for business spending. Moreover, we’ve seen engagement on the platform skyrocket. The total payment volume on Float has increased ~20x since our seed financing in June 2021, and our average monthly customer spend has increased more than 6x since our public launch in March 2021. None of this would be possible without our amazing customers, many of whom have played a major part in helping us develop new products and features. We look forward to delivering even better service to our customers over the coming months and years. 

Float’s Vision & Mission

Float’s vision is to deliver an end-to-end business spending platform for small and medium-sized businesses. We want this platform to enable businesses and teams to focus on investing in their growth and eliminate the need to use different banking and software tools to make day-to-day payments. One of our first customers said it best — “It’s hard enough to run a business, let alone figure out how to spend the money in our bank account.” We believe a lot of businesses share this sentiment, which is why Float’s mission is to simplify spending for companies and teams.

The Problem Float Solves

The pain point that Float is solving has been top of mind for Canadian businesses and their teams for years, and yet largely ignored by existing market players. There are over one million companies in Canada spending nearly $3T per year and the process of getting a corporate card continues to be incredibly difficult for small-to-medium sized businesses. Despite being the number one preferred method of payment for ~80% of Canadian businesses, it still takes 4+ weeks to get approved and an endless number of forms required. If you’re lucky enough to get approved, you’ll likely get a card with stifling limitations — low limits, high FX fees, personal guarantees and the inability to share these cards with your broader workforce. And that’s just to spend! After all of that, you’re still left to find a way to systematize expense reports, receipt collection, month-end accounting reconciliation and more. Yuck. 

Float Web App Interface

Enter Float

Float’s mission is to simplify spending for companies and teams. We offer Canada’s first high-limit, no personal guarantee corporate card and enable any business to start spending in 3 business days or less. Most importantly, our product is digital-first and empowers businesses and their teams to take control of how they spend. Administrators can create and cancel cards on the fly, set custom spending limits and assign cards to individuals on their team. Employees can request spend using Float directly from Slack, while managers can review and approve spend in real time. Float also speeds up the month-end closing process by natively integrating with popular accounting software such as QuickBooks and Xero. Lastly, Float offers 1% cashback on all transactions. That’s right – real cash in your account, no tricks or gimmicks. 

Excited About Our Mission?

Float is run by a passionate and mission-driven team that is focused on delivering world-class experiences to its customers. Our culture is dynamic, fast-paced and execution-oriented. We think we’re a great fit for talented people who want to operate with a high degree of ownership and accountability and always put customers first. We’re now hiring across major business functions! If our mission aligns with you, please get in touch or apply online.