Traditional ways of expense reports leave less control to businesses. Employees spend first and submit expense reports later. Though it has to be approved, you cannot control or reduce the payments. You will have to approve reasonable reports that match your expense policies.

In a few years, you will spend more on reimbursements alone. You need a smart money allocation tool like virtual cards for businesses to keep tabs on this. With limits and budgets, what your employee spend will be in your control. Create cards, assign them to your employees, and add the required credits. It’s simple as that and doesn’t require approval each time for spending. 

Related read: How can virtual cards facilitate recurring payments in India?

Create departments to keep an eye on departmental budgets. You can monitor employees’ expenses. But keeping tabs on how much they spend is difficult to do for a big team. You can rather excise budget on how much a department spends. Departmental-level control is much better than employee-level control. Virtual cards allow you to create departments and map employees to them.

When an employee spends, the expense is directly tagged to their department’s budget. Departmental managers can decide who gets the card to spend. They can approve if any card needs more than the assigned credit. That’s how you can manage budgets and control expenses at departmental levels. It’s also applicable to other card payments like SaaS subscriptions, petty expenses, and the like.

SaaS applications are dominating the market. They simplify our work and are accessible from anywhere. They have fixed payment plans that you pay every month. Most teams have credit cards from which they auto-pay every month. But you will have less control as money automatically goes out each month. You also don’t get centralized payment management. Your team can’t instantly find how much they pay a particular vendor.

Besides, if your card is temporarily down, no SaaS payment will go through. Fix this by shifting to flexible corporate cards of Volopay. You can have one card exclusively for each vendor. Auto-schedule their payments for a fixed time and date. Don’t want to continue your subscription? Block or freeze your card. One card being frozen will not affect your other payment cards. 

Virtual cards for business are most suitable for booking flight tickets, hotel rooms, travel card recharges, etc. You give your employees credits to spend on their own. Nevertheless, you also can see where they spend it. Through the Volopay dashboard, you can monitor each card’s spending. 

Also, you can break down the expenses and analyze what costs more. These insights can be very useful in setting budgets for the concurrent year. If costs are higher due to inflation, you have factual data to prove and modify your travel policies/budgets.

Other than travel, employees have other reimbursable expenses too. Modern workplaces attract talent by offering these perks. They can be team lunches, coffee, course fees for upskilling, holiday gifts, and home office furniture. Cards can be the best way to distribute the required funds. You decide the budget, add the credit, and the employee spends that and attaches receipts. 

Your virtual card portal will be a centralized platform to manage all employee expenses. It’s much easier to generate financial reports this way. You can have an entire report dedicated to employee expenses alone. You can glimpse overspending areas and departments and take necessary action. Accurate and easy-to-collect financial data is important for making budgeting decisions.

Credit card theft can happen within the blink of an eye. Your card details are sensitive and must be protected. But physical cards are prone to damage and theft. It takes additional time to contact the bank and block it. When a card is exposed, it also puts your vendor information at risk. This cannot happen to a virtual card.

Each card is independent and is not related to other cards. If card details get stolen, you can safely isolate that from the network. Block, delete, and freeze — these are options to regulate the card. Each card has unique details, which protect your payment information and capabilities from theft and attack.