Author: Ruslan Nikolaev

Working from Home 🏘️ – the new reality

The transition to the work-from-home environment hasn’t been easy for anyone. With teams becoming distributed overnight, many businesses didn’t have a chance to adjust their internal processes to the new reality. One such process is managing and sharing corporate cards.

What most companies do right now

Today, many of the companies share their cards online via slack or other messengers without thinking about the repercussions… Is this a familiar sight?

Why is this bad?

• This is not secure – recent reports show that an average credit card credentials are sold on the black market for as little as $8.50
• Once you share the credentials, you can’t un-share them
• If an employee leaves, what do you do? Cancelling the card sounds like a horrible idea.
• You probably don’t even know who made a purchase on your card!

Solution – password managers

Some companies have created a process around card credentials sharing with password managers like 1Password or LastPass. However, this approach doesn’t guarantee that your employees won’t overspend or keep the password credentials after they are done with the purchase! Do you often go over budget on credit card spend? This might be the reason why!

In addition, it’s still a pain to reconcile expenses when you don’t know who is making transactions on your cards and who has the receipts to them.

A better solution – Approval workflows with Virtual cards 💳

Have you heard about Virtual cards?

Virtual Cards are like Visa credit cards that you have in your wallet but they only exist online. The merchant doesn’t know this, they think it’s just a credit card. What’s the benefit, you might ask?

1. Every time you create a new virtual card, Visa generates unique new card number for it
2. You can create unlimited virtual cards and don’t have to wait for them to be shipped – you can spend instantly!
3. You can set independent limits on each virtual card
4. Virtual cards can be issued and cancelled in seconds – without having to deal with a bank

Moreover, when paired with a smart approval process, you can essentially eliminate personal reimbursements in your company. Instead of your employees paying out of pocket just to be reimbursed later – create a one time virtual cards with a limit and let them spend from that card. Employees will never overspend and you won’t have to deal with reimbursement paperwork!

Where to get virtual cards?

Hmm… this might be the million dollar question. This must be your lucky day though, because Float has them!

Float virtual cards come with:

• Robust access controls for each card
• Smart, fully digital approval workflows
• Accounting integrations to help you keep track of all your expenses
• Reporting to get real-time visibility into your expenses

With Float you can eliminate out of pocket expenses in your company, saving time and money.

Let’s look at some facts:

• Digital marketing spend is increasing and is going to reach US $640B by 2027, growing at CAGR of 10.3%
• During COVID digital marketing is the main lead generation channel (source)

This means that the companies must get better at tracking the impact of their marketing spend and empowering their marketing teams with the right tools/workflows. So what are the problems marketing teams are facing today?

Problem 1: How much do I have left to spend?

With many finance workflows happening at the end of the month, teams usually don’t have real-time reporting on their spending. This means that your marketing team most likely does the following:

What makes this worse is that, from interviews with marketing specialists, the marketing teams are forced to assign one of their colleagues on expense tracking duty. This usually takes up a lot of their time and clearly isn’t the most exciting activity of their day.

Problem 2: Reconciling expenses with T&E expense workflows

One job that a marketing specialist should not do, is reconcile expenses – that’s the role of the finance team. Yet, some marketing teams are forced to use T&E-like workflows from Concur, Intact, etc. which were designed to capture diverse expenses that occur on a sales trip.

Current workflow:

• Create an expense report
• Write out charges as line items for each campaign
• Attach invoices
• Categorize transactions
• Match expense to transaction from the bank statement

This workflow is extremely inefficient and clearly wasn’t designed for marketing expenses. Oh and by the way, online advertising platforms charge you on daily basis, so you have to do this EVERY DAY just to keep up with your spending. Not great… 😢

Possible solutions

Excel sheet

Marketing needs to keep their own books: an excel sheet that you need to update every day with daily campaign spend from all accounts across the entire team. This will require someone to spend hours every day collecting spend from all accounts and will cost a fortune in inefficient use of labour. Excel sheet is more like a flex tape.

Virtual cards 🌈

A much better approach is to use technology that was designed to solve this problem. Virtual cards have been built for the trucking industry to get visibility over trucker’s cashflows. Similarly, in marketing virtual cards can offer a lot of benefits:

• Real-time spend visibility – you are always in the know how much you’ve spent
• Set and forget – label a virtual card with accounting tags once and all transactions will be automatically tagged for you
• Spend control – assign cards with limits to employees, campaigns or channels to always be aware of where the money is going
• and more… flexible limits, easy receipt capture, secure payments, easy card sharing

So the virtual cards can automate all of the accounting for your marketing team and relief the pressure off the finance team’s reporting function!