It’s that time of the month again - time to reconcile those dreaded corporate credit card expenses. Although it tends to be a painful and challenging process for finance teams and staff members alike, having a corporate card makes sense for both businesses and their employees - it’s just a matter of finding the best way to do it.
Here we’ll discuss what the typical reconciliation process is for corporate credit cards, the challenges that come with it, and how businesses can address this challenge by choosing a corporate card provider that suits the needs of their business.
At its core, reconciliation is a way for businesses to make sure the charges they receive on corporate cards match their internal finance records before they make any payments. It’s a necessary process that ensures that the amount of money leaving the account matches the amount spent in a fiscal period - and, of course, that no fraudulent activities slip through the cracks.
Typically the reconciliation process can be separated into three parts:
The manual labour involved in reconciling expenses with a spreadsheet is inefficient and leaves room for human error. Businesses have started to address this by using software to automate parts of the process, providing a digital audit trail.
However, the fact that credit cards are being used (as opposed to cash cards like Budgetly) means that there are still significant challenges being posed - the biggest culprits being:
For this reason corporate cash cards are becoming more popular for small-to-medium sized businesses, where finance teams are likely to be wearing multiple hats and are stretched for time.
This is a relatively new option - using a platform like Budgetly, small businesses can issue preloaded corporate cards to staff. There are several benefits to choosing this option when compared with the previous two:
If you’re an Australian SME, a prepaid corporate card and expense management platform like Budgetly is probably the best option, because traditional cards are limited in terms of flexibility and control (and we’re not just being biased, there’s a reason that this solution was created, after all!).
If you’d like to learn more about Budgetly, download our eBook, Managing expenses with Budgetly. Or, if you’re interested in seeing how it works, feel free to schedule a demo.