Business credit cards cut out the time and stress of reconciling your employee's cash expenses. They make it easy for teams to travel and pay for their expenses without paying out of their own pockets.
Companies often use business credit cards to reduce the need for petty cash, cut the amount of individual reimbursements, and allocate spend faster with a monthly statement.
Sure they give more visibility into spend than cash, but they open the gateway for employees to exceed budgets, exceed card limits, or in some cases, commit expense fraud. It's difficult to maintain full control on spend, and achieve real time visibility into who is spending what when it's not done in real time. Reconciliation also can create issues when matching expense reports to credit card statements.
But, now there is a new kid on the block that sits in between cash and corporate credit cards, the prepaid debit card.
Whether you call them prepaid debit cards, prepaid company cards, or company spending cards - they essentially all refer to the same thing. They are an alternative to business credit cards that act similar to a rechargeable gift card.
Simply put, you give a card to an employee or department, load it up with however much money they require, and set limitations to control their spending. Employees then use cards to make purchases. Cards are then be topped up daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, and frozen and cancelled within seconds. From the back office end, you're able to get real time visibility into all transactions and make better cost saving decisions.
The main difference in how they work? It's not a credit line you're receiving with a prepaid debit card, instead its direct money paid via bank account.
Not only can you control the exact amount on each card at any time, you can control how often they are topped up and freeze them off and on if needed. With a company credit card your only way of creating control is through the limit.
No paperwork, false claims, or manual errors when you control the entire expense process. Reduce risk by eliminating the possibility of bogus claims and corporate card overspend. After every purchase, use the app to take a picture and categorise the purchase, leaving less room for error or fraud.
Employees no longer have to worry if they are spending withing their expense policy or daily limits. Nor do they have to pay out of pocket and await a sometimes lengthy reimbursement process. With instant notifications to the main office, they have the ability to request top-ups while on the road or cancel or freeze a card should a problem arise.
Prepaid debit cards offer real time transaction updates - within seconds you have complete oversight to what was purchased, by who and what category it falls into. This makes it easier to prepare budgets, forecast, and reallocate funds.