Account security is vital for companies who are giving their teams access to software that contains valuable company information. For any organization, it’s important for team members to have the tools they need to perform their jobs on a daily basis. At the same time, it can be difficult to keep track of accounts, ensure employees are using secure passwords, and verify that account access isn’t being shared with others.
At Float, account security for our customers is one of our biggest priorities. That’s why we’re excited to offer SAML SSO login for our Professional Plan members, and multi-factor authentication for all Float customers.
What is SAML SSO?
User management can be a headache, especially for large companies or those who are scaling. The reality is, employees come and go and keeping track of accounts and logins can be quite difficult – not to mention, it poses a security risk too.
SAML enables Single Sign-On (SSO) and provides increased security and convenience for companies by allowing for just one set of secure login credentials across platforms, including Float. SAML works by passing information about users, logins, and attributes between the service providers and identity providers (iDp) including Azure, Okta, Auth0, and OneLogin.
For Professional Plan members, Float uses SAML to securely pass authentication and authorization from your identity provider to Float for a secure Single Sign-On experience!
The Benefits 🤩
Employee onboarding or offboarding 👋🏼
IT and security teams can seamlessly manage users in the organization.
Greater convenience 👍🏼
Employees only need to sign into one platform. No need to remember multiple usernames and passwords!
Increased security 👀
SAML SSO is one of the most secure ways to enable account access for companies and teams.
We’ve got more tech acronyms for you!
Have you heard of MFA? No? 🤷🏼♂️ Well hear us out! Multi-factor authentication (MFA) provides basic authentication for your company’s team. It works to improve account security and prevent unauthorized login attempts by requiring an additional “factor” to verify that the person logging in is really who they say they are. 🧐
This can include a text message with a unique code or a one-time-password (OTP) issued by a third party authenticator app such as Google Authenticator.
The Key Benefit: Increased Security
By adding an additional checkpoint for a user login, you protect the company from hackers getting access through compromised passwords.
Here’s how it works ⬇️
To set up SAML SSO
SAML SSO is available to Professional Plan members. (Not yet on our Professional Plan? Upgrading is easy! Just contact our Support team and we’ll walk you through the process of coming to the Professional side.)
Head to your Settings page and click “Account Security”. From here, you’ll be asked to enter your identity provider’s information and connect to Float.
Visit our Help Centre for more detailed instructions on setting up SAML SSO.
To set up MFA
Did you know MFA is available to all Float customers?! Here’s how you can enable it:
Go to your company “Settings” page and click “Account Security”. From there you can configure your login policies with our MFA settings.
Once enabled, the next time your team logs into Float, they will be prompted to set up MFA and choose either text or OTP as their second factor for login security.
After that is complete, they will be prompted to enter their one-time code or password.
Visit our Help Centre for more information on setting up MFA.
At Float, we’re bringing you one step closer to smarter, more secure spend management. 👊🏼 If you have any questions about enabling SAML SSO or MFA, we’re a click away!
Tired of wasting time filtering through hundreds of receipts? Or even worse, maybe you’re constantly chasing employees down for missing paperwork. We know the struggle. That’s why we’ve taken it upon ourselves to put an end to this once and for all! With Float’s Expense Policy feature, we can ensure employees submit their receipts on time every time. 🙌🏾
What do we mean by “receipt compliance”? 🧾
Receipt compliance is essentially the financial policy that ensures all employees at all levels of an organization are meeting the receipt requirements set out by their finance teams. Float’s Expense Policy feature enables receipt compliance by giving administrators the power to determine the number of missing receipts allowed in specific expense categories before a Float card is paused. ⏸️ Through this feature, admins are able define several levels of compliance to better organize and track employee purchases, while enforcing spending policies across departments.
Once a card is paused, employees will no longer be able to use it. They’ll either have to go into Float to upload the missing receipt or mark the receipt as “lost.” This feature also eliminates the typical routine of last minute receipt uploads at month-end, which often leave finance teams stressed during their busiest times. Float’s receipt compliance feature is an optimal way to keep employees on top of their spending, while giving finance teams and controllers greater visibility into spending all month long.
How to set up receipt compliance in your organization 👩🏼💻
To set up receipt compliance within Float, you’ll first want to implement your company’s expense policies via our Approval and Submission policy features. Submission Policies let you define the transaction information that employees are required to submit, like receipts and accounting codes, while Approval Policies let you assign multiple approval layers for employee spend requests within your organization.
From the “Settings” page click “Submission Policy” and create a policy around specific expense categories like travel, entertainment, or employee benefits. Select whether or not receipts are required and if you’d like to pause cards with missing receipts.
Every time you create a card going forward, you will assign a specific submission policy to the card and employees will be automatically prompted to submit receipts as soon as a purchase is made. 👍🏼
How to submit receipts to Float 🤳
Float has the simplest way to submit expenses as soon as they are made, eliminating the need for tedious expense reports and back-and-forth with the finance team.
Once a purchase is made using a Float physical or virtual card, the spender will be automatically sent a link to upload receipts and submit all the relevant purchase details.
Best of all? There’s no need to log into Float or download yet another app. Here’s how it works:
Make a purchase on a Float card 💳
Float will text or email a link 📧
Upload receipts and fill in the purchase details 🤳
Our receipt compliance feature keeps both employees and finance teams on top of corporate spending – avoiding bottlenecks whether it’s monthly, quarterly or at year-end. It simplifies accounting and reconciliation and reduces your chances of lost receipts or high volumes of receipt submissions at the 11th hour. It gives employees that friendly reminder they need to upload their receipts in real time, while empowering bookkeepers to organize and tag those transactions with ease. You might say it’s a win-win! 🎉
If you’re ready to simplify your accounting processes and bring greater financial accountability into your organization, book a demo with Float today!
More often than not, company expenses are handled in a reactive way.
Employees will make a business purchase using personal funds, submit the necessary information to get it approved by finance, and later get reimbursed via payroll. That’s a lot of administrative overhead (and delayed financials).
But you can make life a lot simpler by replacing this reactive approach to company spending with a faster, more proactive one.
With Float, finance teams can issue cards to employees worry-free with $0 card balances and custom limits, and automate company expense policies while gaining full visibility and control over spending.
But first…
What is an expense policy?
An expense policy is a set of guidelines made by a company that clearly identifies acceptable and unacceptable business expenses and the processes for getting them approved and reimbursed. This gives the finance department and administrators the ability to quickly determine the validity of an expense, and gives company spenders a clear understanding of what they can spend on.
Benefits of having expense policies
Expense policies offer a structured and logical way to control company-wide spending. That way, when an expense is rejected or questioned, your expense policy will serve as the final standard for making decisions on approving or rejecting the spend request.
It standardizes the rules for your expense management process, while also helping to prevent non-compliant expenses from being made. It also gives your finance team a gold standard to govern those incoming spend requests and quickly determine what’s acceptable and what’s not.
With everyone aligned on the company spending guidelines, senior management is better able to control costs more efficiently and calculate spending forecasts.
Types of expense policies
Depending on the size of your business and the industry you’re in, your expense policy will differ.
Some companies may have one broad expense policy and others may have multiple expense policies specifically related to travel, entertainment, or departmental expenses.
Typically an expense policy will include:
Expense Categories: Different types of expenses that employees can incur, like travel, meals, accommodation, or office supplies.
Spending Limits: Clear limits for each expense category, specifying the maximum amount employees can spend without additional approvals.
Approval Process: The steps employees must follow to obtain approval before incurring expenses, including any documentation required.
Documentation Requirements: The supporting documents, such as receipts or invoices, that employees need to submit along with their expense reports.
Reimbursement Procedures: How employees should submit expense reports, including the required forms or software systems.
Non-Reimbursable Expenses: Expenses that are not eligible for reimbursement, such as personal expenses, fines, or alcohol.
Travel and Accommodation Guidelines: Guidelines for booking flights, hotels, and rental cars, including preferred vendors and any travel-related policies.
Expense Audit and Compliance: The process of auditing expense reports and the consequences of non-compliance with the policy.
What’s the downside?
Having guidelines in place is essential to maintain control over employee spending. But more often than not, expense policies become corporate documents buried in a shared drive, which leads to:
Complicated and time consuming approval processes
Purchases being made that are not compliant with policy
Limited visibility into spending
High administrative overhead on reimbursements and reconciliations
Teams being limited in making purchases necessary to help grow the business
The good news is that Float allows you to implement your company’s spend guidelines directly on Float Cards themselves – ensuring that purchases made on Float Cards are automatically compliant with your company’s expense policies.
Automated expense policies in Float
Float allows you to set boundaries for corporate spending directly on Float Cards themselves, with automated rules for transactions that reflect your company’s expense guidelines.
So every time a company employee makes a purchase on a Float Card, our intelligent software will determine if the transaction complies and automatically prompt cardholders to upload receipts and expense information as soon as a transaction is made.
Contrary to traditional teams where only a limited few hold business credit cards (and share them), Float allows company’s to issue Float Cards to all team members, worry-free, with real-time visibility and control over company-wide spend.
Here’s how:
✅ Approve spend before it happens
Multi-level Approval policies based on your company’s organization structure lets employees easily request to make a purchase from managers (with an audit trail).
🤖 Automatically collect receipts and GL codes
Submission Policies let you define the information employees are required to submit with each transaction, like receipts and GL codes, and will pause cards without them.
🛡️ Protect your company from unauthorized spend
Individual card controls like Merchant Controls let you restrict spending at certain merchant categories and custom Recurring and Temporary limits ensure your company doesn’t get overcharged.
📉 Get insights into your cash flow
Float’s Reporting feature provides a real-time overview of company spending with insights into who is spending what.
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Want to learn more about Canada’s smartest corporate cards and business spend software? Get our Spend Management Guide at the link below.
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
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.”
Create a Team in Float
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.
Add users to Float
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.
Create your approval policy
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!
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!
Float is Canada’s first smart corporate card and spend management software that provides businesses with real-time control and visibility over company-wide spend. We provide businesses with an unlimited number of high-limit Visa corporate cards tethered to our spend management software.
What does Float’s spend management software do?
Simplicity for bookkeepers by moving the entire spend management function into one single platform with added visibility, control and sharing capabilities 🤩
In-depth analysis of company spending with real-time data 👀
Elimination of expense reports and other manual tasks like reconciliations with automatic receipt collection and matching 🙅🏻♀️
Improved accuracy by minimizing human error and expense fraud ☑️
A healthier company spend culture with greater productivity and communication 💸
Empower employees to easily spend and request approvals for what they need with smart approval flows 🙌🏻
How does Float improve the spend management process?
✅ Physical and virtual corporate cards
Float offers both physical and virtual corporate cards that directly link to our spend management software. Our cards provide full visibility of usage and spend, they link directly to your General Ledger, enable simple and fast card issuance and seamless reconciliation. They’re straightforward for employees to use because of their pre-approval workflow and help administrators control budgets and dictate how much money is being spent and where. Virtual cards are accepted and function like physical credit cards and reap the same cash-back benefits. They offer high levels of efficiency, visibility and control, which traditional cards lack.
✅ No more expense reports
We understand that filing expense reports is a huge time constraint for bookkeepers, so we made sure to fix it for you! But we didn’t just solve the problem — we completely eliminated expense reports altogether! Float users get quick-view access to the vendor name, the date and time of the purchase, the method of payment, the purchase amount and access to the receipt upload tool. By empowering managers to pre-approve company expenses and easily issue controlled corporate credit cards, employees no longer have to use their personal cards to make company purchases or be reimbursed. With automated receipt compliance on purchases made with Float, you’ll never have to chase down another receipt.
✅ No more manual reconciliations
Having to manually reconcile purchases is time-consuming, there’s guesswork involved and minimal control is permitted. Float offers an automated process that can be completed in a fraction of the time and easily uploaded to your accounting software. You can see the payment date, the method, the amount, the spender and the transaction status. It also allows you to easily upload files into your accounting software of choice with integration tools. The “Status” tab will let you know if the specific transaction has a receipt attached, if the GL code of the transaction has been uploaded to your accounting software and provide a description of the purchase.
Three key functions of spend management with Float
1. Accounting automation
Our automated spend management software is designed to reduce human error, eliminate cross-system reconciliations and save time for finance and accounting teams to focus on higher-value work. By increasing efficiency through automation, it enables faster decision-making at the company level.
2. Approval workflow
Our approval workflow processes allow companies to set up administrators who can approve and review company expenses. The administrator is directly linked to the card spend, which means expense requests and approvals are carried out before a transaction takes place. Our approval workflow processes can be integrated with communication tools such as Slack to speed up the request and approval time-period. It allows for greater productivity, increased visibility and control for budget owners, compliance protections for employees, audit trails of approval and adjustable budgeting.
3. Real-time reporting
Real-time data increases the visibility of spend and access to key data insights on the spot. With real-time reporting automation, Float optimizes this process to be completed in a matter of days – no more waiting weeks to update the books. This simplifies month end and year end tasks and it also allows managers and administrators to track KPIs and better manage budgets.
Closing your month end books with Float
Float makes month end a lot easier with an array of features that simplify the process from start to finish.
Categorize & tag transactions: Most transactions are coded during the card creation phase or Merchant Rules Set Up. For missing transactions, you can easily go in and tag them accordingly.
Follow up for missing receipts: After a purchase is made, users will be instantly prompted to submit their receipt. If employees do not comply, we also have a “card pause” feature that auto-locks the card if a specific number of receipts are missing. If you’re not using this feature, you may have to follow up with employees directly to submit their receipts.
Bulk export transactions: This can be done through our Xero or QBO integration. If you are using a different accounting system, you can simply download a CSV extract, format the file to fit the requirements and bulk upload the transactions.
Helpful Float features and functions
⭐️ GL codes are designated and approved when a card is created
⭐️ Merchant rules help to categorize transactions with the option to override card rules
⭐️ OCR feature automatically extracts tax data from receipts instead of your accountant doing it manually
⭐️ QBO and Xero Integrations speed up the process and make things 10x easier
What to expect from Float
✅ Faster reconciliation versus the lengthy process with traditional credit cards
✅ Less categorization and tagging with the ability to apply GL codes in bulk
✅ Time saved tracking taxes using the OCR feature that pulls data automatically from receipts
How Float cards work 💳
Your Float limits = your bank balance. Float cards integrate directly with your bank account and automatically maintain your desired balance on your cards. You can connect your bank accounts and set up auto-top ups to ensure your cards never run out of funds. Float cards are accepted anywhere VISA is, which means you can use them for purchases just about anywhere.
Why is Float such a great option for bookkeepers?
Integrations. How we make Float work with you. 💡
Spend management seamlessly integrates with other software platforms and systems to make your financial processes simple and more efficient. We provide a direct integration with existing accounting software that uploads your Chart of Accounts as it appears in QBO or Xero. No need to retype or re-add data! We also give you the ability to classify tax codes and vendors before you export so that all the information is pre-populated within your software. Our support team is available to respond to inquiries and our help centre resources will walk you step-by-step through exporting. We also offer manual exports to download a .CSV or .PDF statement with receipts included.
Accounting (General Ledger) integrations
Our accounting General Ledger (GL) integration allows users to implement rules to automatically categorize transactions as they happen, which can later sync to the GL. We’ve developed a seamless process between Xero/QuickBooks and Float, where your Chart of Account and vendors are regularly maintained and updated inside your Float account. This allows you to export all of your expenses at month-end directly into the accounting software with the receipt. It requires you to spend less time on each individual vendor and improves speed and accuracy throughout the process.
Custom exports
While we don’t yet have Netsuite or Sage two-way integrations (coming soon), we do customize export and accounting settings for our customers who use these integrations. We do this by taking your master template and customizing your Float exports so that you can make a bulk upload into the accounting software.
Other integrations
Our Slack integration allows employees to request a virtual or physical card for future purchases by typing “/spend” in Slack. When a request is made by an employee, the administrator receives both an email and a Slack message where they can choose to approve or reject the request. The employee simply enters a request name, recurring expense option, purchase amount, the expiration date of the card and request description/notes. The administrator then has full visibility of these input parameters and has the choice to approve or deny the request.
Does this process look familiar?
Corporate cards workflow before Float.
What about this?
💡 The Float Effect
Want to see it in action?
Categorize Transactions
Once you’ve made your first transaction with Float, you can view it on your Transactions page. From there, you can modify and prepare your transactions for an easy accounting export. This includes updating GL codes, making bulk transaction edits, attaching receipts, updating tax treatment and assigning vendors. You can also add custom tags or add departments to better track your transactions.
Receipt collection
Float’s automated receipt collection feature allows you to create automatic reminders for spenders to upload receipts and send recurring reminders every 24 hours until the receipt is submitted. If receipts are not collected in time, managers have the option to enable an auto-lock feature, which prevents the employee from making purchases until their receipts are uploaded.
Export transactions in QBO, Xero or CSV
If you’re using QBO:
Expense records are created on the export of every transaction and contain all details of the transaction such as categories, tax, receipt, description and the uploaded receipt/invoice.
Users must click “Transactions” and then click “Export to QBO”
The transaction amount gets debited to the appropriate expense GL account and credited from the Float Clearing Account in QBO account.
If you’re using Xero:
Invoices and payments records are created in Xero.
The record contains all of the details of the transaction such as categories, tax, receipt, description and the uploaded receipt/invoice.
Users must click ‘Transactions’ and then click ‘Export to Xero’.
If you’re using CSV:
While logged in to your Admin portal, navigate to “Transactions” in the left sidebar.
Select the transactions that you would like to export.
Hit the “Export to Excel” button in the top right of the page and select “Regular.”
Mark all transactions as “Exported.”
And that’s it! If you’re interested in using Float as a Bookkeeper for your clients, feel free to reach out to our team for a demo!
Overcharged and Overwhelmed? Not on our watch. Float has designed a feature that allows you to easily manage transactions from ALL your vendors.
A common pain point we’ve seen across many startups and SMEs is the struggle to keep track of multiple vendor payments made across departments. Let’s say your marketing team is racking up their Google ad spend and software subscriptions, while your sales team is expensing Uber rides and client lunches. When you’re scaling rapidly, this can be incredibly difficult to keep track of and it’s next to impossible to know what you’re actually spending. Now, imagine all of this with just one corporate card?
At Float, we’ve not only made it easy to issue multiple corporate cards in 3 days or less, but you can now code these cards to your individual vendors.
What’s in it for you?
👀 Full visibility of spending and transactions on the Float dashboard 🚨 Spot fraudulent transactions in real time ❌ Set limits on cards and cancel then instantly 🔎 Keep a pulse on subscriptions and reduce overcharges 💆🏼♀️ Close your books at month-end without all the stress 💳 Quickly replace and renew cards based on your growing needs 💸 Spend quicker without any downtime on your company’s operations
Greater spend control. Less stress and headaches.
If you’ve ever been double charged or charged incorrectly, then you know the headache that comes with getting it fixed. 🤯 You can avoid this altogether when you create a separate card for each of your vendors and set a hard spend limit. For example, if you know that your Zendesk subscription is $100/month, you can authorize a recurring withdrawal from Zendesk without giving them access to any additional funds from your account. The vendor will only be able to charge the preset amount that you agreed upon at sign-up and nothing more! 👍🏼
If any vendor tries to charge more, your Float card will automatically decline the transaction and alert you of this attempt. From there, you can simply connect with the vendor and inquire about the additional charge. Float also makes it easier to cancel your card if you’ve terminated a subscription or contract with a particular vendor. No confusion. No long wait times. No extra charges. ☎️ 🙄
Spend management has never been easier 🤩
For the Finance Team 👩🏻💼
Float allows you to have a “set it and forget it” attitude. You don’t need to keep a close eye on unauthorized transactions that may be going through because you’ve already pre-approved vendor withdrawals and set limits on every card. With the long list your finance team likely has going – Float gives them one less thing to stress about.
For Bookkeepers👨🏻💻
Using this feature, bookkeepers will already have the GL account pre-coded at the card level. This cuts down on time spent during month-end close because they don’t have to waste hours categorizing hundreds of transactions at the very last minute. Since GL codes can be approved the moment a card is created, bookkeepers can have the peace of mind knowing there aren’t any errors to look out for when closing the books. The accuracy is there but the stress isn’t!
At Float, we’re in the business of making spend and expense management a whole lot easier, quicker and more efficient for businesses. We know how stressful the process can be for finance teams, managers and even employees! That’s why we’ve designed each one of our features with you in mind.
Ready to level up your experience with Float? Don’t go anywhere – we’re about to let you in on all the tips and tricks. 😉
We’re in the business of making things easier, faster and more reliable for our clients at all times. To deliver on this promise, our team put their heads together to give you the latest hacks so you can make Float work for you at maximum speed and efficiency.⚡️
Hack #1: Tag transaction categories using merchant rules 🔎
Is your finance team sick and tired of constantly attaching GL codes, specific tags and tax codes to the same vendors and transactions? We have a solution for you! All you have to do is go to the Transactions page > go to the top right > select Manage Merchant Rules. Here you can automatically tag and assign whichever filter you want to a specific vendor so you don’t have to do it every single time. 🙌🏾
Here’s an example: anything purchased from Air Canada is most likely a travel expense. In instances like these, you can tag these recurring transactions as “travel” or “flights” and save time by tracking the same GL code to the same vendors.
Hack #2: Bulk edit your transactions ✅
Float allows you to edit, delete or modify multiple transactions all in one shot! This hack is especially helpful if you have a recurring set of transactions and vendors on a monthly basis. It speeds up month-end reporting and improves accuracy by eliminating the chances of human error and letting the software work its magic. 🪄
To bulk edit your transactions, go to the Transactions page, select a group of transactions and instantly apply the same GL code, tax code or any other key details. So if the majority of your employees expense Uber rides on their Float card, you would then go to Transactions > Ready to Export > Search “Uber” and mass select those transactions with the GL code: Transportation.
Hack #3: Mark receipts as lost 🧾
Missing receipts. It happens to the best of us. 🤷🏼♂️ Although Float provides the option to auto-pause cards after a specific number of receipts are missing, we also enable users to bypass the receipt locking feature and mark receipts as “lost.” This not only eliminates roadblocks on daily spending but it actually allows employees to go back and upload the receipt once it’s been found. Of course, you’ll want to be cautious of how often employees are using this feature to ensure they remain compliant with corporate expense policies.
To label a receipt as “lost”, go to the Transactions page > click on the Transaction > click Receipt Options > select “Receipt Lost.”
