Is it time to ditch your legacy corporate card provider?

Amex, Chase, and other legacy corporate card solutions come with rewards programs and some controls. But they’re issued à la carte and siloed from the rest of your spend management systems. The result? You’re under-equipped to catch overspend before the damage is already done. 

If your solution gives a myopic view of how employees use their cards, struggles to customize purchasing restrictions, and keeps letting out-of-policy transactions somehow slip through the cracks, it may be time to ditch your current solution.  

The problem with legacy corporate card providers

If you’re here because of your quiz results, you know you’re seeing issues. Here’s why you should consider breaking up with your corporate card issuer. 

You can only see spend at the end of the month

Conventional corporate card providers leave employers in the dark about employee spend until after end-of-month statements arrive. This gives finance teams a laggard view of costs and sometimes surprises department heads with a larger-than-expected bill, throwing budgets out of whack. 

You’re constantly chasing down receipts

If your corporate card management is disconnected from your bookkeeping and other cost control processes, your finance team is probably manually matching easy-to-lose receipts to charges to make sure the books tie out. Reconciliation becomes a pain, and employees, approvers, and accounting teams all slog through endless games of hide-and-seek to track down every receipt to back up every card transaction. 

You struggle to enforce spend policies 

Setting employee spend rules is one thing. Actually enforcing them is trickier—especially with legacy solutions that don’t let you customize purchasing controls to the unique needs of every employee. 

Because different team members need to make different credit card purchases. While a lavish dinner can help a sales executive woo a client, the meal likely has less business value for an entry level engineer. Traditional card solutions may falter when it comes to automatically greenlighting or blocking the same type of transaction based on different employee attributes. 

A better, unified approach

Now, imagine a solution that tightly integrates with the rest of your spend management processes—syncing corporate cards with expense reimbursements, payroll, and vendor bills. Rippling Spend gathers all these systems together, giving teams unprecedented control and visibility into their company’s financial picture. 

And since all Rippling systems use employee data as a single source of truth, you can sync all your finance, HR, and IT processes–paving the way for time-saving automations, granular policy controls, and comprehensive reporting. 

Here’s how Rippling’s corporate cards outmatch run-of-the-mill issuers. 

Proactive spend controls

Rippling lets you set hyper custom card policies and automatically control how, when, and where employees can spend. Using employee attributes like seniority level, department, and work location, you can determine spending limits and automatically block or approve transactions based on the vendor or transaction amount. No more unpleasant surprises in card statements or tedious end-of-month reconciliation. 

Corporate cards alongside expense reimbursements

Legacy corporate card providers typically don’t come with expense reimbursement features, which puts companies, who often don’t want to issue cards to every employee, in a bind. They have to figure out who gets cards and pay for a separate solution (or set up a time-consuming manual process) to pay employees back when they make personal charges. 

Rippling puts credit cards and reimbursements under the same roof. With one login, admins and finance teams can manage both systems, and employees have a unified platform to quickly file expense reports and make corporate card purchases.  

Automatically issue and revoke cards

With Rippling, your employee data can sync corporate card management to HR processes. That means you can automatically issue either physical or virtual cards during onboarding and revoke them during offboarding. What’s more, spending controls like card limits and vendor restrictions automatically change accordingly when employees get promoted or switch teams. 

Sync spend with accounting

Rippling also automatically syncs corporate card transactions to your general ledger, saving bookkeepers countless hours of manual reconciliation. You can also automatically match receipts to charges, helping balance the books with ease.

Ready to look beyond your boilerplate corporate card solution? Schedule a demo today and see how Rippling can give you more control of your spend. 

This blog is based on information available to Rippling as of July 30, 2024.

Disclaimer: Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.