Accounting automation: Four reasons to smart corporate Visa cards

Company cards should be among your tools. Whether credit or debit, they remove the need for employees to spend on their personal cards (or better - stop employees from spending on personal items using business funds), which is a massive benefit as it means employees don't need to be reimbursed. On top of this, your company cards can give you better oversight and spend control — as long as they're connected to smart expense management software.

The truth about corporate Visa cards

Company credit cards are massively popular with businesses big and small. In fact, Visa reported that 68% of small businesses used credit cards for business spending in 2021.

At Payhawk, we offer Visa corporate credit cards in multiple markets, including the UK and the US, which can provide your business with several benefits, including:

1. They improve cash flow
2. They’re interest-free
3. You can issue them fast
4. And biggest of all: our credit cards are backed by the same smart expense management solution as our debit cards. Meaning you have spend controls, adjustable workflows, accounting automation, and spend visibility — all in one place

What's the deal with company cards? Are they all the same?

For a start, there are multiple card providers, the biggest including Visa and Mastercard. On top of that, there are various types of company cards, including prepaid, debit, and credit.

Our corporate cards provide a line of credit up to €/$250,000 upon assessment, with the option to have cards in both Sterling and Euro (for UK-based enterprises) or USD (for US businesses). Twenty-six million merchants accept cards in more than 32 countries, which is ideal for multinational enterprises. Plus, foreign exchange transactions have a low 1.99% flat fee.

Behind the cards: automation power

A comprehensive spend management solution should include corporate Visa cards (credit and debit), AP , and expense management software — all in one place. And linking these features together? A ribbon of automation that will help you collect accurate, comprehensive data to tell an important story about spending in your business.

Customers using our spend management solution have 80% less manual data entry and close the month an average of four times faster than before.

Automation begins with every Payhawk card user in your company. They don't have to manually classify and calculate receipts and fill out expense forms. Card users can simply photograph their receipts with their mobile and upload them to the Payhawk app. The data is auto-captured by clever optical character recognition (OCR) software. All the user needs to do is select a project, team, or similar spend category from a customized dropdown in the app and fill in a few words about the expense.

The OCR is just the start. Here are four reasons to choose corporate Visa Cards backed by accounting automation.

1) Forget filling in fields

Our use of OCR software allows all the account expense fields to be filled out automatically, requiring employees to do almost nothing. And in the cases where colleagues forget to upload receipts, they will receive automated reminders from Payhawk, saving your finance team from chasing.

On top of this, in the accounts department, the whole process of reconciliation can be automated company-wide, saving painstaking, tedious work. Our machine learning feature also identifies if your payment is a recurring subscription and helps to highlight duplicates across the business or issues with cost creep.

2) Unparalleled control and customization

The accounting team can create all approval workflows in a few clicks and set up different policies according to the staff seniority level with varying credit levels and approval requirements. We let you customize across your company's spend management system, allowing you to set fields or exceptions for any expense, location, or team.

Like many SaaS tools, spend management solutions don't operate in a vacuum. We integrate with multiple ERPs and accounting software options, including NetSuite, Xero, and TravelPerk.

3) Better inform your strategy

Using Payhawk doesn't just automate expense processes; it also gives you increased oversight and, therefore, better transparency and reporting ability across all company finances.

With a complete view of expenses in real-time at scale, your company can make more informed decisions on any aspect of spend policy. This view helps better manage the company's cash flow by predicting expenses and accounts payable. In turn, your budgeting can become far more agile and accurate.

4) Company cards; simplified

Our Visa credit card provides cashback on card payments up to the amount of your subscription. We also offer dedicated IBANs, SEPA, and Faster Payments for businesses with entities in the UK and EEA.

Another advantage of our smart cards is that an entire team can share one card, which is ideal for product development or marketing teams, for example. 'Team cards' can eliminate the need for multiple card accounts for a team with the same budget.

Carolina Einarsson, Finance Director at Essentia Analytics, says: "It's super useful to use company credit cards via Payhawk. It means we don't have to tie up cash in the expense management platform; anything that can increase the cash flow is good for the business. It also gives me one place where I have both control and visibility over all of our cards — and upload all of our receipts."

Interested in learning more about how our credit cards and expense management software can help your business? Book a demo today.