
When conducting any form of corporate spending process for your business, it’s important that you have the best tools in place to boost the overall efficiency of the process.
One of the best things to incorporate, in light of this, is virtual credit cards. These cards can bring a wide range of benefits to your business and most importantly, streamline all of your payment processes.
In this article, you’ll learn what virtual cards are and how they can streamline your company’s payment processes.
What are virtual cards?
Virtual cards are a form of credit card that exists virtually for your company. They work in a similar way to physical credit cards, except these cards aren’t stored in a physical wallet but in what’s known as a digital wallet.
Your digital wallet is a form of application kept on your mobile device, and it allows you to access your virtual credit cards, along with all the features and data that come with it.
This can include viewing all your active cards, topping up money on a card, seeing past transactions, viewing the card number or expiry date, and canceling any cards.
Your cards can be used for payments in a store, online, over the phone, and in many other instances.
One important thing to consider when choosing the best virtual corporate cards you need to implement spend management software to help manage the cards.
Your software will allow you to keep all your cards in a digital wallet, where you can not only access all the features that come with a digital wallet but also have access to more expert features of spend management software.
This can include things such as spend insights, spend controls, automated features, and much more.
How can virtual cards streamline your payment processes?
Virtual cards, along with spend management software, are the ultimate tool for every business looking to streamline payment processes. This is achieved in many ways, including:
- Complete visibility on corporate spend
With virtual credit cards implemented into your business, you’ll gain full visibility on your corporate spending, which saves the time needed to search for data.
Using spend management software with your cards, you’ll be able to track every payment that’s made from each virtual card throughout your whole business.
This data is also provided in real time, so any transactions can be immediately identified and recorded on your platform. You can then assess all the data of each payment – the amount, the time of payment, the recipient company, the service purchased, etc.
This way, you’ll have the most accurate picture of corporate spending, and you won’t need to spend unnecessary time waiting for payments to be recorded or added to the logbooks.
- Automated payment processes
Another way virtual cards can streamline your processes is through the automation features they can provide.
One example is with payment approval processes. With traditional methods, there can be significant delays in payments being approved by senior team members or the finance department.
With virtual cards, you can automatically approve certain payments which fit specific criteria of your choosing.
This means there won’t be delays in payments being executed, and the entire process is smoother and uninterrupted.
- A range spend controls.
You can also streamline payment processes with spend controls on your virtual cards.
An example of these features is having to spend limits on your cards, which means any transactions which exceed a certain amount will be automatically prevented. You can also receive alerts when any of these transactions are attempted.
This can help streamline your payment processes since you won’t have any overspending in your company which might cause you to have to re-evaluate your budgets or make further adjustments to your spending approaches.
Instead, all this is avoided by automatically preventing these payments with effective and efficient spending controls on your virtual cards.