Why healthcare practitioners need corporate cards?
Like all industries are shifting to the digitized and automated way of financial management, so is the healthcare industry.
The involvement of technology in this industry doesn’t only help in appropriately allocating funds for different departments and operations — it assists in employee administration, shift scheduling, salary transfers, etc.
As important as automation systems are for healthcare management for a business, it is equally essential to give doctors, and nurses access to some main features; mainly corporate cards.
Financial management is the basic 101 of running a business; however, there are so many techniques, ways, and tools available.
Your business would use whichever one suits its requirements, but deciding which features or tools are important is a big task. For now, let's talk about the most popular and critical one — corporate cards.
A business makes numerous expenses. This is especially true for healthcare companies or hospitals, as they have an intense amount of money movement every single day.
Most of the expenses or purchases are made by employees. Allowing them unchecked access to the system can lead to fraud and thrift.
Plus, asking the employee to make expenses out of their pocket and get reimbursements later can be even more complicated because all the burden would go to the reimbursements team.
Processing a high volume of claims all at once can be financially damaging for the business. Hence, expense management platforms, and some individual providers, facilitate businesses with a smart expense-making tool called a corporate card.
A corporate card is strictly a card made for business expense use. It can be both debit and credit type. A corporate debit card would allow employees to make payments and purchases directly from the company’s funds.
At the same time, a corporate credit card would be loaded with funds which will be a loan on the business. Check out our article on corporate credit cards in India to know more.
But, the amazing feature of this card is that it is connected to expense management software or an individual card application that displays all information in real-time.
This means that any transactions made through these cards would be immediately tracked and recorded in the system. All details related to the withdrawal would be available with just one click.
Hence, your business gets relief from the burdensome reimbursement process and also seamless control over expenses and spending made in the company.
When expenses are manually managed, the employees are required to take care of a lot of requirements, rules, and limits, which ultimately makes the process tough.
While making any expenses, doctors and nurses will definitely have to take care of the expense limits, keep paper receipts and trails of all the purchases, properly fill in expense or claim forms, input data into spreadsheets, get approvals, and a lot more.
These employees are supposed to be giving their time in treating patients, not maintaining expense records. These rules and limits can become extremely frustrating.
But these are important to the business, which is why there is automated expense management software built to do all the groundwork.
Healthcare centers and hospitals are hubs of incoming and outgoing people; each patient would have different bills, scans, procedures, and individual files with all the necessary documents and information.
Multiple patients mean multiple files and an endless amount of papers. Again, how can we expect doctors and nurses to not only manage all the medical documents but also properly file and fill in the finance-related documents and process those?
This is a paper-intensive approach, and it is a highly lagging and inefficient process. Your hospital or healthcare unit would either collapse or always function on edge.
You would not be able to do any future planning, plus your doctors and nurses would also have to divide their attention between patients and document management.
The healthcare units are buzzing with tending to sick patients. Hence, the employees working there already have a lot of things to remember and take care of in order to treat their patients.
Along with this, when those employees are required to take care of other financial tasks, errors are bound to happen. Mistakes can happen in billing scans or treatments provided, sometime a service could be charged twice, and many more.
Manual systems of expense and payment management can be highly prone to errors; rectifying those errors would again take double the effort and money investment.
Healthcare expense management is an extremely heavy business finance operation. Tracking all payments, bills, vendors, employee expenses, etc., become intense in an already sensitive environment. Any mistake could lead to major faults.
Now the even more painful thing is when healthcare expense management is done manually, it tends to occupy a colossal amount of time ask everything from receiving invoices to billing, payments, and approvals all have to be done manually by the healthcare finance team by running around to different people and departments.
Now all the above-mentioned problems and struggles can be effectively solved by adopting just one smart tool, i.e., corporate cards. With corporate cards, you can:
Create or align the corporate card software to your company’s expense policies and ensure that all your employees have signed and agreed to those policies.
Once this is done, you can give your employees corporate cards for making spends from the business’s funds.
The system would automatically track all expenses and payments in real-time and notify the managers or heads if there is any non-compliant expense being made.
Moreover, the corporate card won’t allow any expense to be processed if it is not aligned with the expense policies.
Every corporate card comes connected either with elaborate expense management software or basic reporting and expense tracking software.
So, all the expenses and transactions made by any employee through those cards would be automatically tracked and recorded in the system.
This means that the finance team or the other employees are no more required to keep paper receipts for audit and reconciliation purposes; no one would have to sit down and manually enter data into a sheet and match it with bank account statements.
Corporate cards prove to be a potent solution for managing how much money can be spent or allotted where. When you get corporate cards for your business, you get the ability to set spending limits, and if those can be renewed or not.
So, when you assign a card to a doctor or nurse, they would have limited funds to spend on the equipment required, from basic things like syringes to larger scanner machines.
The healthcare industry is highly time sensitive; every second counts. Plus, they always need to be prepared for any kind of emergency, like pandemics, mass casualties, etc.
With a corporate card in hand, it would become easier for medical professionals to make on-spot expenses or purchases in order to tend to the situation.
Moreover, everything is done on the software. Hence, the doctors or nurses don't have to spend time running around for expense approvals or sit down and write the purchases made.
With everything being digitized and corporate cards being impressively intertwined with expense management technology, the operational efficiency of the healthcare unit has increased.
Medical professionals would no more have to worry about manually entering expenses and purchases and making claims for reimbursements.
This means that doctors and nurses would have all the time to completely focus on their core job of providing the best care for their patients. So along with the improvement in financial efficiency, professional and medical efficiency also tend to enhance.
The healthcare sector is a complicated business to run because it is not just about making money and billable hours. It is also about providing care to sick people and tending to people’s medical problems.
However, the mechanism still needs to be oiled, and both aspects of this business need to run hand in hand. That is why there are rules and regulations and financial policies.
Continuing on the same note, to help the mechanism run smoothly and function with systematic management and expense management software, majorly coming with corporate cards is the best way to go about it.
Virtual corporate cards prove to be effective as your business can create as many as wanted, set limits on those, and categorize the spending purpose as well.
For example, different amounts of funds are allotted to different research projects or operative sections. By using a corporate card, each of these units can be given a card, and the spending would be tracked and aligned with the policies automatically.
So, if any non-work related expenses are made through those cards, they would be flagged or recorded for an audit trail.
Another example is if you assign a corporate card to a doctor for travel purposes, all the traveling charges like flight bookings, hotel charges, and food and beverages expenses would all be made through that card.
The finance team would be able to track all this money spent and find ways to either reduce the spending while still maintaining quality or make any changes required in the policy.
With the evolving times, the healthcare industry has made major revolutions and advancements in technology for treating patients.
There are various machines and tools to provide the best care, like automated processes for distribution, scheduling, staff shift management, etc.
Along with adopting automated processes for patient care, the healthcare industry is also taking steps towards automating the finance part of the system.
A complex industry requires extremely well-coded and designed expense management software, which provides all kinds of features and management tools in one platform.
The best option for fulfilling all requirements is Volopay. Our spend management software takes off all the workload and gives the employees the space and time to focus on other important aspects of their job.
Your business might be a small practice or a huge public hospital; Volopay facilitates the customer with seamless control and complete transparency.
Volopay offers various features which can help to boost productivity and induce coherence in the system, such as:
• Corporate cards, both virtual and physical
• Direct accounting integration
• Auto-categorization and mapping
• Multi-currency digital wallets
• Reimbursements system
• Data reporting and analysis
• Global business accounts
• Lowest FX international transaction facility
• Real-time data update and tracking procedure, and much more
Hop on and enjoy the benefits of financial automation with Volopay.