How fast-growing companies increase cash flow using corporate cards

As innovation economy companies scale and spending amps up, it’s crucial to balance it out with ways to increase cash flow. You may have a rapidly growing workforce, be developing and launching new products, even expanding globally. To keep pace with monthly needs, if you’re tapping into a corporate credit card, think of it as more than just a payment tool. The right commercial card program can be a strategic lever that helps improve cash management, precisely control spending, and make smarter data-driven decisions.

Check out some key strategies for using a corporate card to help increase cash flow.

Increase cash flow float with extended payment terms

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of a corporate card is that you can meet immediate needs and pay for them later. Unlike ACH or check payments, corporate cards provide a strategic "float" period between purchase and payment.

While many business cards have a standard 30-day billing cycle, SVB offers an additional grace period that can extend your payment window up to 55 days before balances are due. This extended timeline allows you to maintain working capital for critical expenses like payroll and supplies.

We’ve often seen clients leverage this float as a bridge to manage timing gaps between receivables and payables. It creates an interest-free short-term financing option for operational needs.

Simplify vendor payables by consolidating payments

As a scaling company, you may be accumulating numerous vendors to meet needs such as SaaS subscriptions, suppliers, shipping services and more. If different people across the organization are paying vendors independently, using different payment sources and terms, it can add more complexity and cost.

Having a corporate card program that enables you to issue virtual cards is a significant advantage. You can consolidate and centralize vendor payables by issuing cards customized for specific vendors, categories, or departments. And you can control that spend with pre-set budgets, expense policies, and automated approval routing.

Centralizing vendor payments on virtual cards also gives you unified, real-time visibility and automated reconciliation, so you can boost efficiency and reduce manual work. It’s a powerful way to drive down costs while increasing control over spend – both of which are critical ways to increase cash flow.

Empower decentralized teams while maintaining central control

As your organization expands across multiple teams, geographies, or business units, decentralized purchasing becomes inevitable. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up oversight and control. A well-designed corporate card program delivers the perfect balance, enabling you to:

• Issue virtual cards instantly to team members who need purchasing power
• Maintain central visibility and control over all spending
• Modify or revoke access privileges in real-time as needs change

Virtual cards let you precisely control spend with customizable parameters. For instance, you can set specific spending limits per card or team, restrict purchases to approved merchant categories, implement active periods, expiration dates and more. This approach also makes it easier to enforce policies using automated rules related to travel expenses, receipt requirements, and approval workflows.

Improve cash forecasting with spending insights

Legacy payment methods like ACH and checks (and even some business credit cards) only give you basic information for tracking transactions. With a modern corporate card platform, you can tap into volumes of data to capture actionable insights that really matter.

From a single dashboard you can track all recurring and discretionary spend, and access data-rich real-time reports. For example, you can pinpoint which teams are spending on what, where your money goes each month, which vendors receive the most business, and how spending patterns change over time.

Data-driven insights on spending trends and most used categories are valuable to help CFOs improve cash flow forecasting. And identifying your most-used vendors can be a lever to negotiate discounts or better terms with suppliers. It’s also an agile way to target unnecessary costs and spot unusual activity so you can act quickly.

Choosing a commercial card that centralizes your spending and integrates robust expense management enables you to track and manage all purchases, travel spend, and vendor payments through a single platform. With policy-controlled cards and automated processes, your teams can work more cost-efficiently and empower the company with more ways to increase cash flow.

Learn how SVB commercial cards and our dedicated experts can help you optimize your cash management strategy.