Month: June 2022

If your marketing team is constantly asking for the corporate credit card, don’t worry – you’re not alone! With Float, you no longer have to use a single card for all of your business purchases. Your finance team can instantly issue an unlimited number of physical and virtual VISA cards specifically to your marketing team — including managers, employees, and even interns!

Float gives marketing teams flexibility to spend while providing the finance team with oversight and control. It’s a win-win.

How Float drives marketing teams forward 🤩

Marketing is typically one of the biggest spenders in an organization — regardless of the industry you’re in. In the age of digital advertising, the list of expenses is always growing and can be even more complicated to manage without the right tools in place. These day-to-day expenses can include:

💰Funding social campaigns
✈️Travelling to conferences
💻 Purchasing software subscriptions
➕ So much more!

Easily request cards for marketing spend  🙌🏻

Your marketing team needs to be able to make strategic decisions fast, without any bottlenecks. Our Expense Policy features enable Finance Admins to give marketing team leaders the authority to set spending limits on cards and quickly approve spend requests from their staff.

You can log into Float at any time and easily request a single use virtual card for purchases like swag orders, props for shoots or photography equipment. For advertising and software subscriptions, you can request a recurring virtual card. Virtual cards are issued instantly and accepted everywhere VISA and Mastercard are – all you have to do is simply copy and paste the card details into the vendor’s billing details page.

Instantly create a virtual card by vendor 💳

Create a virtual card by vendor to easily categorize the types of recurring online spend your marketing team is making. A virtual card for every vendor gives you the option to create daily, weekly or even monthly recurring cards with assigned budgets. For example, if you know that your Facebook ad spend is $40K/month, you can create a recurring monthly card with that limit.

A virtual card by vendor allows you to:

💵 Set monthly budgets for specific marketing activities
👀 Easily track and control spending over the month
☑️ Set limits to every card to ensure spend isn’t exceeded
✋🏽 Ensure vendors don’t overcharge the card without your authorization
💳 Avoid disrupting other subscriptions or payments when you pause or cancel a card

Use physical cards for real world expenses 💳

The finance team can issue a physical card to each marketing team member who has on-the-go expenses for travel, conferences, or client meetings. Float offers unlimited physical cards to Professional plan members, and with the ability to set card limits and apply automated expense policies, there’s no reason to hold out.

Cardholders are automatically reminded to easily send Float receipts and assign pre-defined GL codes as soon as the purchase is made, eliminating month end expense reports and reconciliations.

Track spending in real time without any guesswork ✅

Managing corporate spending closely is on everyone’s minds right now. If your finance team doesn’t have a smart solution in place, it’s likely taking over their 9-5. 🤯 Using Float, marketing leaders can log into the platform at any time and monitor their team’s spending in real time. Expenses like Google ads, travel costs and even miscellaneous expenses like morning coffee and lunch are all visible and categorized by vendors too! Gone are the days of asking for budget updates over Slack and tracking spend through a spreadsheet. Float makes everything available for you right on the dashboard. No guesswork, no errors and no stress! 👍🏼

Managers can also assign auto-tags to clearly define each employee’s role and spending authority. As for the finance team, Float grants them full visibility over what every department is spending, what they’re purchasing and whether their budgets need to be increased.

Collect and manage receipts in a flash – literally. 📸

With so many transactions being made, marketing teams typically generate a ton of receipts. Float makes it easy to stay on top of those receipts through our SMS receipt upload and email receipt feature. Spenders can simply snap a picture of their receipt and upload it into the platform immediately after a transaction! And if they don’t, managers have the option to send out automated reminders until a receipt is submitted. No more chasing employees down! 🏃🏻‍♂️ Float also provides the option to tag expenses by vendor or category and add additional notes to every receipt submission so that managers know exactly what the purchase was for. 

*If you’re using Float’s Professional Plan, you can also get access to unlimited physical cards – Essentials Plan users get access to five. 

Ready to give your marketing team more autonomy and an easier way to spend? Book a demo with us today or sign up for free! 

There’s often a delicate balance within growing businesses between spending and saving. As a busy finance professional, finding that balance often falls to you… along with all the oversight and administrative work that comes with it.

Enter Float – a physical and virtual corporate card backed by powerful spend management software that gives you far more oversight over spending… while offering significant savings to your business. 

Here are five ways Float can help your business save money:

1️⃣ No surprise fees 

When you spend with Float, you won’t have any surprises – there are no foreign transaction fees, and no hidden monthly fees. Additionally, you can issue unlimited virtual cards as needed… without additional charges. What does this mean? The only charges you’ll see each month are the expenses incurred by your business – no additional fees, and no surprises.

2️⃣ 1% Cashback 

It’s true! For each purchase you make with your Float physical and virtual corporate cards, you’ll get one percent cash back. Depending on your team’s monthly spend, this adds up to significant savings. Some Float customers regularly receive tens of thousands of dollars in cash back – with no strings attached – deposited into your Float account monthly. 

3️⃣ Spend controls that are easy to implement

While Float allows you to issue unlimited physical and virtual corporate cards, you’re able to limit the spend on each individual card – providing you a level of proactive control over your organization’s spend that traditional corporate cards don’t offer.

4️⃣ Track real-time spend by vendor 

Tracking vendor spending is a tedious process of waiting for invoices, processing payments, and logging the transactions. It’s asynchronous, and doesn’t offer a real-time view into what your suppliers are spending. 

Since you control the spend limit on each card, you can set up your vendors with a virtual corporate card with a spend limit in line with their typical monthly spend. This also allows you to track their spending, and increase or decrease their spend limits in real time as needed. This not only ensures that vendor payments are happening on time and on budget – meaning you won’t be overcharged – saving you time and money.

5️⃣ Set approval structures

Still need peace of mind? Float customers are able to set up multiple expense approval processes to ensure that even if a vendor or employee needs a credit top-up, spend is still monitored, and can be approved on the fly… even via Slack.

💰 Bonus! Earn up to $150k in special offers from Float partners

Becoming a Float customer is simple. Applications take just five minutes online, and you can be approved in a few days. Compared to a traditional approval timeline of four to six weeks for traditional credit cards, it’s not just a financial savings – it’s a time savings. Plus, Float’s perks program provides some pretty sweet bonuses… adding up to $150k in additional savings for your company. 

Here are just a few:

• Intercom offers a FREE first year, a 50% discount in your second year, and an ongoing 20% discount as long – a value of $61k USD
• Amazon Web Services provides $25k USD in AWS Activate Credits along with a year of AWS Business Support – a value of $5k USD
• Hubspot is offering 30% off a subscription for the first year, and 15% each subsequent year – a savings of up to $35k USD

With this many opportunities to save, what’s stopping you from booking a demo? Find out what makes Float so special today!

Ready to scale your business and ditch the growing pains? Axe your overly complex approval processes and make company spending easier with Float’s Team Management feature.

We saw the need for an efficient feature that helped startups and SMEs decentralize the expense management process, distribute responsibility across teams and give employees greater autonomy to spend. At the same time, we also know how critical it is for finance teams to maintain oversight or control over corporate spending. So, we created Team Management to tackle it all! 👊🏼

Team Management — a feature available through our Professional Plan — enables users to set up “teams” within the platform that are structured to align with their approval policies. It helps you formalize your spend approval structure and fully automates the approval process by team, spend type and amount. You can easily set up teams in Float based on departments such as Marketing, Sales and IT, or by geographic location. For instance, this is helpful if you have a Toronto-based office and a Vancouver-based office, or multiple office addresses in one city.

How to set up teams within Float 👩🏽‍💻
1. Start by determining how you want to track and approve expenses based on your approval policies. For example, if every department manager is responsible for approving employee expenses, create your teams based on department.
2. Identify who in your organization will be assigned as a “Manager” in Float. Add them as a user and assign them the “Manager” role.
3. Continue to add other team members as “Spenders.”
4. Create a team whose expenses are routed directly to the assigned “Manager.”

Each team can have a number of managers or members attached to it. Managers also have full visibility into the spending of the team and can participate in the approval process too. On the other hand, spenders only see their own transactions but always follow the approval process that is assigned to their team.

Creating your own multi-level approval structure 💸
Once your team is added into Float, you can create a designated approval policy that’s specific to a team or your company as a whole.

Using our platform, you can set up approval policies to mimic your company’s existing expense policies and set automated approval flows by spend amount or spend type. You can also create multiple levels of approval for higher spend amounts, one-time purchase or recurring expenses. For example, you can permit a Marketing Manager to approve all expenses under $2,000 and for anything over that amount, you can create a second level of approval that goes through the Finance department. ✅

This feature gives managers more visibility over team spending with the power to set predefined budgets, distribute corporate cards and approve spend requests in seconds! Employees can also log into Float and easily submit spend requests from managers, who can be notified via Slack, email or text. Once approved, virtual cards can be instantly set up and employees can request top-ups if needed. 💳

It’s a win-win for everyone 🤩
Float allows for faster, smarter and more efficient spending all around! 🙏🏽 The ability to set up teams and multi-level approvals provides long-term value for the entire company:

Greater accuracy and control 👍🏼
Managers have a better view of where money is going, how it’s being spent and who is spending it, while the finance team still has control over corporate spending.

Adds speed and efficiency 🚀
A seamless spend approval process means easier and quicker expense management and happier employees who can make transactions in a flash.

Promotes a decentralized structure 💳
Managers gain greater authority to track and oversee team spending, while employees have the flexibility to make business purchases on demand without a lengthy chain of approvals.

Ready to give Float a try? Get started with us today!

Is month-end craziness bogging you down? Float offers a powerful two-way integration with QBO to make spend management a breeze!

Our QBO integration feature packs a punch, offering a range of benefits to make managing your finances easy as 🥧. You can look forward to 

✍🏽Improved transaction categorization 

✅ Better receipt management 

⏱ Time saved with less manual data entry

We designed this feature to sync seamlessly into your daily workflow. Our goal was to optimize the month-end process for your finance team so they could finally say goodbye to low-value tasks and guesswork. Our QBO integration feature makes it so that you no longer have to re-add and retype data with the reassurance of greater accuracy in your books – not just at month-end but on a daily basis! 🚀 

With Float’s QBO integration, you manage all card-linked transactions in Float, and then directly export into Quickbooks, with transactions automatically coded and reconciled for you. Once you try it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it!

See it for yourself in this quick product tour.

Currently using Quickbooks to manage your corporate finances? Here’s how Float levels up  your experience and your books:

3 ways to automate spend management using our QBO feature 🙌🏻

👩🏽‍💻  Auto-apply category transaction settings and pre-code cards by GL, Vendor, Tax or Tag

✅  Set up merchant-based rules to enable auto-categorization by merchant or vendor 

💳  Bulk update hundreds of transactions for purchases that have similar accounting settings

QBO manages your receipts better – with tax included 🧾

Float allows every employee to submit receipts via email, text or direct upload into the platform. Once a receipt enters the system, Float uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to pull the tax and tip off a receipt for easy and simple tracking. We know that some Canadian provinces have unique tax rules, and so we created this feature to accommodate multi-part tax codes and auto-recognize them every time a receipt is exported. 👍🏼

We know that so many SMEs and startups are using Quickbooks. That’s why our main goal is to easily integrate into every part of your work day so that managing your finances is a responsibility that’s easy, shared and simple to track. 

To learn more about Float’s QBO integration feature, book a demo with us today!