5 Ways to Cut Costs and Manage Spending with Virtual Cards

Companies are always looking for more ways to reduce unnecessary expenses while mitigating risks. Whether you're a global company or an SME, it can be a challenge to keep up with employee spending and other necessary costs required to keep your business operational. Despite its challenge, keeping track of your company's payables can greatly reduce risks and unnecessary expenses if done properly. Far too often, companies pose a great risk to themselves via the incomplete reporting of expenses, lack of transaction visibility, and insufficient protection against the growing risk of fraud. CFOs, who are responsible for the business's financial standing and well-being, are beginning to make the shift towards virtual cards to better protect their business from all these risks.

Virtual cards for SMEs are best described as a financial instrument that can be used to pay securely online anywhere where card payments are accepted. These can be used by a business or its employees. They work as physical cards meaning each card has a unique 16-digit number, expiry date, and a CVV so that you can pay online in a secure way.

When a business makes use of Corporate Virtual Cards, it will help them to improve cash flow, reduce fraud risks, and provide better transaction visibility and control when compared to bank transfers. Virtual Cards also help businesses to lower their transactional costs too.

Here are 5 ways how to cut costs and manage spending with virtual cards:

Running a business requires exceptional organizational skills. Between personal employee expenses, department expenses, taxes, and expenses from paying suppliers and other important members of your business, keeping track can become a daunting task.

With one simple miscalculation or a forgetful employee who didn't fully report their spending, it can be nearly impossible to trace back the source of an off-balanced expense sheet. Despite its challenge, CFOs and their team must pinpoint exactly where mistakes in the expenses occur. This can be an extremely time-consuming task that takes the financial department away from more important endeavors. Without properly tracking expenses, however, the business is more likely to fail over time.

Using corporate virtual cards can help your business easily track expenses, allowing your CFO and financial team to focus on more important activities. Your business can choose to issue unlimited single or multi-use spending cards for a transaction. As the name suggests, single-use virtual cards can be used once while multi-use virtual cards can be used for multiple purchases. Since these cards are used for specific tasks, the expenses can easily be tracked by project or employee, ensuring that every penny is accounted for and expense sheets remain balanced.

Since virtual cards are designed to be single or multi-use cards, the expenses placed on the cards can easily be controlled. For example, a single-use virtual card can only be used once. In a multi-use card, limits can be placed with just a few clicks which can restrict the amount that is allowed to be spent or the number of times it can be used. You can also restrict virtual cards by merchant, merchant category, time of day, or value.

Having total control over company spending using virtual cards can give your CFOs peace of mind knowing that there is an added layer of protection keeping your business within the set financial plan. Virtual cards can greatly reduce unnecessary expenses and keep your CFO happy all by allowing you to control company spending.

As previously mentioned, virtual cards allow for easy tracking of expenses. Because of this feature, virtual cards make it easy to also manage online subscriptions. These can range from buying software services such as hosting, internal communications tools, or social media advertising, for example. Whatever your business subscribes to, managing an ever-growing list of subscriptions can be a difficult task to accomplish without a visual aid or a reliable system to keep track of everything your business subscribes to.

Multiple subscriptions that require monthly payments can result in hefty bills, which should be closely managed to ensure no surprise charges are added and that you are receiving everything you are paying for. Virtual cards can also ensure that payments are made on time so that important subscriptions aren't accidentally cut off due to an insufficient mode of payment, or a prepaid card running out of funds.

Virtual cards make it easy to manage all your online subscriptions as a single-use virtual card can be created for each subscription. This allows you to track spending, ensure payments are made on time, and never miss another recurring payment again.

Having full control and easy access to your company's virtual cards greatly reduces the risk of fraud. Fraud attempts can easily be made if an unauthorized person gets ahold of a company card and decides to use it. Oftentimes, charges made on a physical corporate card can go unnoticed for long periods before anyone has a chance to block it. By that time, however, the company is likely to have suffered detrimental losses with a small chance that they will ever be able to recover the money that was stolen. Fraud can also occur online if hackers can find stored card information in the company database, resulting in similar financial damages.

With virtual cards, fraud can be reduced and, in some cases, stopped before it ever occurs. Since virtual cards make it easy to visualize spending, catching unfamiliar charges made with a company virtual card is a lot easier than with a physical company card. Much like prepaid cards, virtual cards are also designed to be single or multi-use, making certain cards impossible to commit fraud with. In multi-use card cases, the virtual card can usually be traced to a specific project or employee making it easy to identify who may be at fault.

Virtual cards can also easily be blocked online, making it easy to delete the virtual card altogether and preventing any acts of fraud with that specific card. Replacing virtual cards is easy, making it more manageable for financial teams to get rid of virtual cards that may be linked to fraudulent attempts.

With numerous internal company expenses and endless subscriptions to keep track of, closing the books at the end of the month can be a tedious task that not even the best CFO wants to handle. Multiple physical company cards can make it difficult to bring all the company expenses together under one file so that they can be arranged appropriately.

Having debit virtual cards will enable your business to close the books faster since everything is connected to one account. Furthermore, metadata could be added to each virtual card which could be used to identify and reconcile a transaction quickly. For example, this could include a booking reference or a campaign ID.

If you are looking to lower your transactional costs or have better control over your online spending, Fyorin corporate virtual cards, powered by MasterCard, will help you to achieve that. Fyorin cards can be used anywhere online card payments are accepted, and multi-currency cards could be created which will earn you cash back on every spent.

With Fyorin, you can create as many virtual cards as you require. You can easily and securely share virtual cards with employees and control the amount to be loaded onto the card and when it should happen. All the virtual cards that Fyorin provides are debit cards and can be linked to a multi-currency account and/or sub-accounts with a dedicated IBAN. In terms of reporting, we provide one single report containing accounts and/or sub-account transactions together with virtual card transactions to help you close the books faster.