- Centralizing oversight of spending with a well-planned commercial card program enables data-rich insights for better cash flow optimization, forecasting and risk mitigation.
- Decentralizing execution of spending equips distributed teams to meet rapidly evolving needs and strengthen vendor relationships, while staying on-budget and in-policy.
- Bridging the gap fosters financial collaboration across the enterprise to increase efficiency, lower costs, and improve working capital.
Later-stage companies with mature commercial card programs know that cash flow optimization is not all about reducing costs. Often more important is to focus on increasing oversight and spend control, while efficiently enabling employees company-wide.
Centralizing your spend management controls does not mean you have to take autonomy away from teams across the enterprise. Think of it as a strategic bridge between having holistic oversight and supporting decentralized execution. Let’s unpack it.
The power of centralized oversight to help optimize cash flow
As high-growth companies evolve, operating expenses typically span across multiple business units, geographies, and procurement categories. The enterprise may be juggling the escalating demands of more employees, more products, more industry events, more global markets. To keep the fast pace pumping along, it’s typically more efficient to decentralize spending to avoid bottlenecks. But that can also spell financial disaster if it goes unchecked.
That’s why it’s equally vital to centrally manage spending through a single commercial card program that gives the finance team unified visibility and control with an integrated spend management platform.
The ‘why’ goes well beyond centralizing control over budgets and spend policies, although those are highly compelling reasons. This approach also centralizes payment data to empower finance leaders with richer analytics that can provide foundational support for cash flow optimization.
Strategic advantages that help increase cash flow
- Gain holistic cash flow visibility to understand spending patterns and top expense categories across the organization in real time.
- Increase forecasting power by tapping into volumes of historical data to predict working capital needs across departments, and fine-tune vendor payment strategies.
- Improve risk mitigation by quickly identifying unusual activity so you can take action, such as revoking a compromised virtual card number or modifying restrictions on a card.
In addition to supporting your finance team, you can automatically sync card data to your ERP to generate insights dashboards for your C-suite executives.
How decentralized execution supports cash flow optimization
While centralized oversight provides cash flow control, decentralized execution of spending empowers business units to move faster and smarter.
Suppose a biotech company’s early clinical trials show promising results, and they want to expand the trial to additional sites as quickly as possible. They suddenly face urgent needs for more lab supplies, diagnostic kits, storage solutions, logistics support and more. Instead of complicated approval processes and purchase delays, with a robust, centralized expense management platform, the finance team can instantly issue or update a virtual credit card with the necessary budget. It enables the clinical operations team to immediately execute procurement and gives finance the visibility and control to ensure purchasing adheres to policies and spending limits and is coded correctly for accounting.
Another example of decentralized execution is enabling local teams or disparate departments to leverage spending insights to negotiate better terms with their most-used vendors. Or employees might engage key suppliers typically paid by check to implement payments using a company card. These efforts can help simplify processes and reduce costs to support your company’s overall strategy to increase cash flow.
How bridging the two delivers ROI
Centralized control over company spend is about ensuring checks and balances, not tightening the reins over how teams get work done. You want business units to be agile and move quickly to meet evolving needs and opportunities. On the flipside, you also need to avoid randomized, uncontrolled spending. Forward momentum relies on the finance team being able to keep a close eye on overall operating expenses and cash flow positions at any given time.
Collaborating to optimize cash flow management
Bridging centralized oversight with decentralized execution fosters financial collaboration throughout the organization. The finance team can standardize and enforce expense policies, dictate spending thresholds, and establish reconciliation frameworks that support faster, more accurate accounting and forecasting.
At the same time, individual teams have the flexibility to handle procurement needs and strengthen supplier relationships by offering a more efficient and secure payment method instead of checks.
Collectively, this approach also helps improve working capital. Teams can leverage the company card to pay supply chain expenditures as they come up. In turn, the finance team can take advantage of the bank’s extended payment terms that provide more cash flow float before paying the card balance. Yet another advantage is that converting check payments to card helps save time and lower processing costs.
For leaders in finance and procurement, the path to better cash flow optimization is not in choosing between control and agility—it’s in designing a model that embraces both. With centralized oversight and decentralized execution, the right commercial card program can become a powerful lever for financial resilience and strategic growth.
Get ready to level-up your cash management strategy — learn how SVB commercial cards can help.