Insights
Best practices and tips on spend management, automated expense tracking and corporate debit cards for Australian SMB and enterprise businesses.
About the Author
Simon Lenoir is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Budgetly. A seasoned business leader with a passion for building high-performing teams, Simon brings a practical lens to finance, operations, and technology. He writes regularly about leadership, innovation, and simplifying business systems to drive impact.
Corporate cards were built for spend. Not control. And certainly not for small and mid-sized businesses trying to run lean.
The traditional credit card model is full of traps. You get delayed visibility on spend, “reconciled later” reporting, and end-of-month chaos when the bill finally lands. It’s convenient for AMEX. Costly for everyone else.
Modern finance teams are waking up to a better way: building spend systems around budgets, not credit limits. Here are five budgeting hacks that flip the old model on its head.
1. Set budgets before the spend, not after
The trap: The classic trap of credit cards is that spend comes first, control comes later. By the time finance sees the statement, the money’s already gone.
The fix: With smart prepaid cards, you allocate funds in advance. Teams know exactly what they can use, and finance doesn’t get blindsided by surprise bills. It’s proactive budgeting instead of reactive firefighting.
2. Auto-categorise spend at the point of payment
The trap: Traditional reconciliation means sorting receipts at the end of the month, often when the context is long gone. The trap here is wasted hours on admin and risk of human error.
The fix: Modern platforms code and categorise expenses in real time. Transactions flow into the right buckets instantly. Finance gains live visibility, managers see how budgets track mid-project, and no one spends Friday night drowning in receipts.
3. Block merchants you’ll never need
Why should anyone be able to buy gift cards at a petrol station with a business card? Or sign up for services your business doesn’t use?
The fix: Merchant category controls let you shut those doors before they open. Set the rules once and the system enforces them automatically. Fraud risk drops. Rogue spend disappears. The finance team can focus on strategy, not detective work.
4. Use virtual cards for subscriptions
The trap: Subscriptions are the silent budget killer. SaaS tools left running long after the team stops using them, duplicate sign-ups under different cards, or worse—forgotten trials that quietly become full-price charges.
The fix: With virtual cards, you assign one card per vendor. One card, one subscription, one clean budget line. Cancelled the service? Kill the card instantly. No manual hunting through statements.
5. Tie budgets to departments, not just people
The trap: Traditional cards are tied to individuals, forcing managers to juggle approvals or share cards (a compliance nightmare). No shared visibility, no accountability, and plenty of bottlenecks.
The fix: Smarter spend systems tie budgets to departments or projects. Marketing gets one pool. Operations another. Finance keeps control, managers get autonomy, and employees know what’s available without waiting weeks for approval.
The bottom line
These aren’t “nice-to-haves.” They’re the foundations of modern spend management.
They turn finance from reactive control into proactive visibility. They save time, reduce risk, and stop the death-by-a-thousand-receipts problem that bleeds cash and energy from SMEs.
AMEX would rather you didn’t know that.
But now you do.
Download the companion PDF: “5 Budgeting Hacks SMEs Need in 2025.”
