For most companies, fraud is one of the major challenges that plague their expense management processes. Traditionally employees use their own money for business transactions like T&E expenses, and office supply bills only to later get reimbursements. It allows notorious employees and vendors to defraud companies through inflated bills, duplicate receipts, or fake expenses. Vendors, at times, could charge for items not listed in the purchase order either by mistake or on purpose. Finance teams, that are overburdened with manual processes, fall prey to such instances. This is why corporate credit cards are the best option for companies to manage their expenses. Besides streamlining their spending, a corporate credit card empowers companies with tools to identify, tackle, and prevent fraud.
Preventing fraud with a corporate credit card
With a corporate credit card, you can introduce a structured approach to your business spending habits and eliminate tiring manual steps in expense management. It will essentially avoid any process loopholes that allow fraudulent activities to fester. Let’s see some of the ways corporate credit cards can help your business avoid fraud.
Identifying non-business expenses
Employees on business trips give in to the temptation and make frivolous expenses, which may not fall under business spending. Even if you have an expense policy in place, its implementation is tough. Additionally, it will take finance teams days to assess the legitimacy of a purchase. Reeling under the pressure of making faster reimbursements, they might oversight some purchases that fall in the grey area. You can overcome this challenge with a corporate credit card. It will allow you to integrate your expense policy with the card so that no non-business transactions happen in the first place. With cards like Zaggle Corporate Credit Card, you can block certain categories for purchases. It is a simple method to prevent money leakages through unvalidated expenses.
Blocking budget overruns
Keeping your expenses well within the set budget is important to ensure stable cash flow management. However, employees can get carried away when making purchases on behalf of the company. For example, when a team is tasked with purchasing a SaaS solution, they could pick an expensive option instead of a better, cost-effective alternative. Since such purchases can be easily justified by the teams, companies will have no other option but to accommodate budget violations. However, this won’t be a challenge when you set a purchase limit with a corporate credit card. With the Zaggle Corporate Credit Card, you can assign budgets for every team beforehand to discourage employees from overspending. It will allow them to be conscious of the budget with better accountability.
Validating invoices efficiently
Typically, when a vendor sends invoices, teams have to do a lot of data entry, which is understandably susceptible to mistakes. Also, the details of the invoices must be verified against the purchase order to ensure everything is in order. However, managing this validation process manually can be risky due to honest mistakes or human bias. Instead, companies can use a corporate credit card that integrates with a spend analysis tool to automate the validation. Zaggle’s corporate card comes with ZatiX, a spend management solution. It will help you digitalize the process to check the validation of the invoices. It will also give you insights into supplier performance, allowing you to identify opportunities to renegotiate contract terms.
Tracking expenses in real-time
In manual expense management, companies will learn about fraud only after the instance has occurred. It will leave companies with little to do and instead plan to avoid such situations in the future. This is where corporate credit cards will add significant value. It will allow you to track your employee spending in real-time so that you can flag and prevent any suspicious purchases. In addition to blocking some categories for card usage and setting transaction limits, a corporate credit card will document all expense details for seamless audits.
Manage business expenses with confidence
Using a corporate credit card for business expenses is all about giving companies control over their spending. It empowers companies to set transaction limits, enforce expense policies, and monitor the use of corporate credit cards by employees. However, to ensure that you maximize the use of them to detect and prevent fraud proactively, you must pick the best corporate credit card like the Zaggle corporate card. It allows you to
- Get a comprehensive view of your expenses across the organization
- Analyze trends to identify cost-saving opportunities
- Review and improve vendor relationships
- Improve compliance with corporate expense policies
Learn more here.