The top nine benefits of smart corporate cards over fuel cards

Manually reimbursing employees for fuel creates unnecessary hassle and errors. Employees can struggle to submit the correct information, you end up chasing receipts, and the whole process leaves you with messy admin and poor spend visibility.

Fuel cards might seem like the answer, but smart corporate cards give you clearer visibility, tighter control, and a far more efficient way to manage spending.

Learn more about the two types of cards and why smart corporate cards beat fuel cards every time.

What are fuel cards?

A fuel card lets employees spend company funds solely on fuel — petrol or diesel — and sometimes other vehicle-related expenses, including car washes, motor oil, toll fees, vehicle maintenance, etc. Some fuel card providers also offer different discounts.

Fuel cards are also usually valid for one specific vendor or, at most, a network of a few very small local vendors, which makes them very limited.

Many organisations consider choosing fuel cards if they have particularly large vehicle fleets and many employees who travel regularly on the road.

What are smart corporate cards?

Smart corporate cards offer flexibility, letting employees easily manage any business expense. When paired with a robust spend management solution, they should also come with built-in controls and policies, meaning you can empower employees to spend confidently (with no risk of overspending).

For example, you might decide that one employee can only spend funds on online subscriptions or purchases from a particular supplier. Other employees might use their cards to pay for anything business-related — business travel, client lunches, office supplies, etc.

At Payhawk, our smart corporate cards are highly customisable to support all your expense types, including fuel. They let your employees spend while you stay in control.

Nine reasons why smart corporate cards are better than fuel cards

We might sound biased, but smart cards are by far the better choice when it comes to picking between corporate cards or fuel cards. Here’s why:

1. Advanced card controls

Monitoring and tracking employee spending confidently and accurately is essential to financial success. With a Payhawk corporate card, you have access to all kinds of useful employee card controls, from setting daily or single transaction limits to blocking specific suppliers and restricting the day and time employees can spend.

You have ultimate control over spending while allowing employees to spend within a predefined spend policy.

2. Improved expense management

Say goodbye to manual reimbursements and manual expense data entry when you use smart corporate cards from Payhawk as part of our comprehensive spend management solution.

With our solution, employees can snap a quick picture of the expense receipt and watch as the smart OCR technology automatically extracts important expense data and transfers it to the Payhawk app. Once the employee has uploaded the expense, your chosen approver will receive a real-time notification to approve or reject the expense. This entire digital process makes everything more efficient for anyone involved in the expense process, just like it did for Vladan Soldat, Founder of Nobel Recruitment:

I linked Payhawk to my Apple Pay, which makes payments even easier. Then, I scan my receipts right away with the Payhawk app, keeping my wallet free of paper receipts. The convenience of instant digitisation makes the whole process so easy.

3. Better spend visibility

Poor spend visibility leads to poor financial decisions.

But with a smart corporate card from Payhawk, you can track exactly who is spending what, increasing spend visibility. You can also visit your Payhawk dashboard to view spend in real time across multiple entities, giving you insightful details about your organisation's spending patterns and making financial planning easier.

4. Automatic reconciliation

Integrate your smart corporate cards and expense management solution from Payhawk with your ERP and accounting software (think NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage Intacct, et al.) for real-time, automatic reconciliation. Not only does this save you time from updating the rest of your tech stack, but auto-synced data means everyone is accessing the exact same figures at any given time, meaning no data confusion.

5. Automated approval workflows

No matter how complex your organisational structure is, you can use our workflow designer to build intricate approval workflows to suit specific team or individual needs and different types of spend.

For fuel-only purchases or travel-related expenses? You can create a completely separate approval workflow to ensure they're overseen by the correct approver, reducing the risk of expense fraud.

6. Enhanced security features

Letting employees spend company money can be daunting, and we understand how vital card security is to you. But, with our enhanced security features, smart corporate cards from Payhawk ensure spend control is as tight and secure as possible.

From card auto-blocking features to being able to limit spending quickly through the portal, employees cannot spend more than you stipulate.

Polina Kasaboneva, CFO, Quantive, says:

[Payhawk] is a convenient, paperless, and totally secure process. If needed, you can freeze the card in a minute. Finance managers can administer limits and access to all expenses in real time.

And it’s not just about keeping money safe from overspending employees; our corporate cards also come with multi-layer security features, including:

• Two-factor authentication — Requiring both a password and a unique code to access, Payhawk’s two-factor authentication system keeps your data safe from prying eyes
• Threat detection — Internal threat mechanisms flag potential security breaches, allowing for prompt investigation before the threat causes damage
• Advanced encryption — End-to-end encryption means your card numbers and sensitive information are safe both in transit and at rest

7. Streamlined expense tracking and reporting

At Payhawk, we also give you the tool to use custom expense categories and filters to generate more accurate reports and ensure consistency across your entire organisation. Introduce mandatory fields like tax rate or project ID to achieve more complete expense data. The more accurate and complete your expense data, the more comprehensive and insightful your report.

And with all of this data available in real-time, you’re in the driving seat when making business decisions that drive tangible results.

8. Ease of use for travelling employees

Improve the employee experience as they travel with a smart corporate card.

Need petrol? No problem, use your corporate card. Need to buy a client lunch? No worries, use your corporate card. Book a hotel? You’ve guessed it — you can use your card again.

A corporate card can be used to spend on any kind of business expense. The employee captures a picture of each receipt, and our OCR technology extracts information, making the expense process as effortless as possible when on the move.

###9: CO2 tracking

Very smart corporate cards (like Payhawk) may also include CO2 tracking, which is very important for many large and growing companies.

Do you need or want to know your carbon footprint related to spending? Our cards and partnership with Lune ensure you can track even the most difficult Scope 3 emissions.

What are the drawbacks of fuel cards?

The benefits of smart cards are clear, and what's more, fuel cards have some major drawbacks, including:

What are the drawbacks of fuel cards?

The benefits of smart cards are clear, and what's more, fuel cards have some major drawbacks, including:

Not everywhere accepts them

Put yourself in your employee's shoes. You've arrived at a petrol station only to find your fuel card isn't accepted. Now, you must pay with personal funds and request reimbursement, which is annoying and maybe even worse if your funds are low.

It's inconvenient and puts your employee in a tricky and sometimes stressful situation. At Payhawk, over 46 million merchants worldwide accept our corporate cards, so your staff can confidently travel knowing they can easily buy fuel and other essentials.

They can be complex to manage

Using employee fuel cards means tracking fuel-specific spend through the fuel card provider while also managing your other employee business expenses through either a different provider or at least using different cards. This makes the entire process confusing and unnecessarily long-winded.

By introducing corporate cards, you can keep all business expenses trackable under one roof and give your employees just one card that enables them to spend anywhere. Plus, you can standardise policies so the processes are the same for everyone.

Checklist: How to decide between smart corporate cards and fuel cards

1. Can I customise spend controls and enforce spend policies?

Customisation is key to making the card work for your business needs. Can you cap certain employees or limit where and what they use their cards for?

2. Can I integrate my card with accounting and other systems? By integrating your cards into your ERP and accounting systems, you can remove duplicate data and make human error from manual data entry a thing of the past.
3. How easy is it to use the mobile app? Travelling employees travel, that's not surprising. But what is surprising is that not every fuel card provider offers a slick mobile app (which is indispensable when on the road).

Look for a solution that will streamline your expense process with OCR (optical character recognition); this tech automatically extracts information from business expense receipts, making light work of everything — no more manual spend reports or lost receipts.

4. How global is my organisation? A fuel card might not be practical if you have many entities across multiple countries to manage. You need a facility that groups all spend in one dashboard, helping you make better financial decisions and organise and process expenses efficiently for every department.

How Porsche e-Bikes accelerate business travel expense management with Payhawk

Before Payhawk, Porsche e-bikes were reliant on one corporate card shared by many people. This setup was flawed, as spending wasn't accountable, and they couldn't set specific team or individual limits, meaning spending visibility was poor.

The team knew there was a better way and switched to Payhawk for a complete spend management solution.

Gabriela Leovac, an accountant at Porsche e-Bike, explains,

The biggest problem was business travel expenses. We didn't have a system that let employees submit their trip expenses easily. And we wanted to find a solution that allowed employees to use corporate cards, apply for a daily allowance, upload all of their travel and work expenses, and get fast approvals.

Equipped with their Payhawk solution, the organisation enjoys insightful and straightforward business travel expense management and no longer suffers missing invoices and limits to spend control. The finance team says they have more time to analyse the expenditure instead of acquiring employee data, which gives them better transparency, tighter expense control, and less paperwork.

Read the full Porsche e-Bikes case study.

Payhawk cards for every purpose

Giving staff the freedom to spend within a spending framework that you can customise as you need, means automatic policy compliance, better spend visibility and control, and an improved employee experience.

Fuel cards, on the other hand, can hinder business expense processing and reporting, making it unnecessarily fragmented and ultimately impacting both the employee and your finance team.

All these features and functionality are available within just one centralised platform. Schedule a demo to talk through your business needs with one of our in-house experts.