Checklist
13 Jan 2025
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10 mins

Corporate card program evaluation: Twenty-four must-ask questions for CFOs

Payhawk Editorial Team
Multi-entity management
Corporate cards
cfo–card-program-checklist
Quick summary

Looking for a time-saving, cost-effective global corporate card program? Evaluate credit cards, card controls, HR integrations & expense software with this easy-to-use 24-question assessment.

Table of Contents

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    On the hunt for your next corporate card provider? Look no further. We’ve put together 24 essential questions to help you evaluate your current program and select the best fit for your business.

    Whether you need corporate cards in multiple currencies (both credit and debit), integrated expense reporting and receipt collection, an effortless sync to your ERP, or all three, this comprehensive checklist will help you pinpoint your gaps and find a better solution.

    First ensure you have your company context at hand.

    Your company context

    • Name/ employees/ where you operate/ approx. number of overall solution users/ no. of legal entities (and where)

    • Some financials (amount of card spend, number of cards you’d like to have)

    • Business challenge/ problem statement you’re trying to solve with a new card program

    • What is your current process (short description)

    • Business goals and objectives (short term and long term/ how do you expect your business to grow in the next 12 months)

    employee assessing corporate cards with a checklist

    What to expect from your corporate card program

    Use the following questions as an assessment.

    Check / tick through the questions in order below to check if you current card setup is helping your business stay agile and in control of spend.

    Card controls

    1. Can you turn your company spend policies into proactive card controls to encourage compliance? (With features like, ATM blocks, spend limits, freezes, blocks, country & merchant restrictions, day & time conditions, and more)
    2. Can your cardholders request funds as needed? And can you set customisable multi-step workflows to approve them?
    3. Can you manage both debit and credit corporate cards in bulk, setting rules and applying them to whole departments with a couple of clicks?

    Payment flexibility and accessibility

    1. Do you have access to slick, globally accepted (Apple and Google Pay compatible) physical cards in plastic and metal?
    2. Can you set up and issue virtual credit and debit cards in an instant?
    3. Can you see real-time spend as it happens and get excellent visibility over expenses at a group level?

    Cash flow supporting credit options

    1. Can you leverage credit lines with limits of £ / €500,000 and $1,000,000?
    2. Can you access credit lines in Euros, GBP and USD?
    3. Can you get flexible with corporate credit cards? (With no personal guarantees or personal credit checks)
    CORPORATE CARDS

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    Cost efficiency

    1. Do you have zero FX fees in USD, EUR, and GBP?
    2. Do you have low FX compared to traditional banks?
    3. Do you get interest-free credit card purchases?

    Data capture and transfer (integrations)

    1. Does your corporate card sync with an expense App in real time? (And, if so: can you capture card receipt data in seconds via the App?)
    2. Can you save hours with bulk employee cardholder off and onboarding (including Teams and Organisational information) via HRIS integrations?
    3. Do you have best-in-class ERP integrations to reconcile card transactions fully and in real time?

    Budgets, team, and project spend

    1. Can you create, track, and update team cards with shared budgets for team, department, event, or project?
    2. Can your finance managers take real-time control over their team spend, budgets, and subscriptions? (What workflows and controls exist?)
    3. Can I link globally accepted corporate cards to team budgets to simplify team and project spend management?
    Carolina Einarsson, FD

    Essentia Analytics

    “Using credit cards with Payhawk is a big benefit for us. It means we have more flexibility as we don’t have to tie up our cash up front! Payhawk gives us a really good ROI and lets us close our month twice as fast.”

    Support flexible spending

    1. Can you offer a lifeline to your cardholders with flexible company spending via instant fund requests (and approvals) for out-of-policy, unforeseen, or emergency payments when required?
    2. Do you know when you need to top up accounts with features like low funds alerts?
    3. Can you use credit and debit cards in different ways throughout the business to avoid tying up cash upfront as required?

    Easy expense reports

    1. Can you support easy card payments with user-friendly expense reporting via an easy-to-use multilingual App?
    2. Does your App include OCR to capture all receipt and invoice data with virtually zero effort?
    3. Can you automate a lot of the tasks involved with expense reporting (including approval workflows, spend categorisation, and more)?

    If you’re supporting flexible global spending, you need a card program co-pilot that won’t let you down. If you have any unchecked answers, you risk slowing your business down, leaving your travelling colleagues in sticky situations, and missing vital, complete global spend visibility.

    Andrew Jacobi, VP of US Finance

    State of Play Hospitality

    “We get complete global spend visibility and can see our receipts for card spend (and invoices) directly in NetSuite because of Payhawk’s integration. We can now understand our P&L fast with no headaches.”

    Your next steps

    Card program sussed? You should know where your gaps are by now, so it’s time to look for a solution to cover them all.

    Our biggest insight? Cards are just the start.

    Implement a spend management solution like Payhawk (that checks all the boxes). ✅

    Beyond issuing global corporate cards, with us, you can:

    • Reduce manual finance tasks by more than 33% with time-saving automations
    • Close your month twice as fast
    • Swerve errors and get 100% visibility with real-time reconciliation
    • Get complete spend overview with zero delays for better decision-making
    • Kick time-consuming admin to the curb with bulk controls, and bulk on-and-off-boarding
    • Track recurring payments to avoid duplicate and overspend
    • Save a potential 2 million euros thanks to VAT reclaims (like ATU)
    • And much more

    Ready to learn more?

    Book a personalised demo with one of our experts, or download the assessment in full to takeaway.