A checkup for commercial card optimization – what to focus on and why

Optimize your commercial card program for scaling

Fast-growing VC-backed companies depend on healthy cash flow and productive teams. When finance operations are not keeping pace with the rest of the business, inefficiencies can directly impact your agility to scale. As a Global Payments Solutions Advisor at SVB, I guide clients through a commercial card optimization checkup to identify how to amplify capabilities and cost-saving efficiencies that keep you on track for growth.

A card program health check focuses on foundational pillars such as data intelligence, vendor spend optimization, and expense policies and controls. It’s an essential strategy to help finance teams improve data-driven decisions and cash management at scale.

Here’s a look into three health checkup areas where optimizing a commercial card program maximizes business value.

Data Intelligence: Integrating and leveraging corporate card data

As VC-funded companies scale up, it’s vital to have complete and accurate spend data intelligence to inform cash management decisions and investor reporting. A checkup for commercial card optimization starts with two essentials: system integrations that auto-sync card transactions to your ERP or accounting system, and analytical capabilities that transform transaction data into actionable insights.

System integrations

Even mature companies often juggle siloed financial systems. But that means limited visibility and time-intensive entry that risks delays, gaps and errors in your spend data. If your transaction data doesn’t hit your ERP automatically in real time, it’s time to optimize.

You’ll want your commercial card program integrated with a robust spend management platform (like at SVB). And that platform should include integrations to auto-sync card data to your ERP. Not only is it a massive time-saver, integration ensures you capture complete, accurate data as transactions occur and expense details are reported.

Data-driven insights

Scaling up means thinking about commercial card data beyond reconciliation and monthly close. It’s a strategic asset that can help answer tough questions. For instance, a priority issue I hear from CFOs is the need to understand what’s driving changes in spend (e.g., whether it’s healthy growth, rising costs, or creeping overhead). Analysis of spend trends and patterns by department, category and vendor can be invaluable.

Finance teams also need actionable insights to control costs for subscriptions and renewals. Particularly for tech companies reliant on cloud infrastructure and SaaS, recurring charges compound quickly. It’s critical to gain a detailed view into that spend (e.g., by owner, cost center, and renewal date). It helps you spot and resolve unused seats, duplicate tools, and expense leakage such as renewals paid without going through approvals.

Integrated, automated card data flows also accelerate finance team productivity. They can close books faster and ensure audit-ready reporting. And to satisfy the board and investors, staff can quickly pull data intelligence to demonstrate cost savings realized from optimizing your card program.

Spend Optimization: Building more value into IT spend

The next crucial area of a commercial card program health check is vendor spend optimization. Think about IT costs. As companies evolve their tech stack over time, software, hardware and cloud services might be paid across cards, ACH and checks. But to improve your monthly cash position and gain tighter control over IT expenses, consider consolidating that spend on a single corporate card.

How can you benefit from centralizing IT spend on your commercial card program?

• Gain a unified view to monitor costs as they occur
• Issue virtual cards with custom limits and expense codes for specific vendors, categories or departments
• Unlock data-driven insights to analyze costs across on-premise vs. cloud infrastructure vs. SaaS
• Track AI tool adoption to avoid spiraling costs as teams experiment with new capabilities 

Another data strategy for IT spend optimization examines vendor concentration. Look at top vendors by top spend, and expenses across vendor ‘families’. You may spot opportunities to negotiate better pricing and terms and consolidate vendors to reduce costs and risk while strengthening relationships.

Policies and Controls: Increasing spend compliance

Commercial card optimization also aims to elevate your expense policies and card controls for enterprise-wide compliance and cost savings. As an example, with an SVB card program health check, our specialists see beyond products to focus on the needs of hyper-scaling companies. We help you create and update spending policies to best fit how you operate today and your anticipated growth.

To guide your policy decisions, it’s valuable to tap into card data to uncover compliance insights. Look at factors like out-of-policy spend rates across cardholders and categories. And patterns in expense and receipt submissions and exceptions. You might also track how many cardholders are still using plastic cards and how that impacts their spending and expense reporting behaviors.

To increase spend control, visibility and compliance, many companies shift to using virtual cards. It enables your finance team to set role-based budgets, timelines and categories, as well as automate approval routing and policy enforcement. Another big win is that virtual cards dramatically simplify expense reporting. Cardholders can submit expenses and receipts via mobile app, which automatically generates expense reports in the spend management platform.

Effective corporate card management is ideal for fast-growth companies to keep spending on-budget and in-policy, and keep teams focused on innovation and growth.

Ready to maximize the value of your commercial card program? At SVB, our experts can provide a complementary card program health check to help you identify opportunities and solve challenges.

Learn how SVB commercial cards and AI-powered spend management are built for the needs of fast-growth companies.

Frequently asked questions

How does a corporate card program integrate with our finance and expense systems?

When a corporate card program is integrated with a spend management platform (like with SVB), it may also offer capabilities to integrate with an ERP or accounting system. The platform then automatically syncs card data between the systems to streamline expense reporting and reconciliation. Depending on your systems, integrations may include transaction feeds, expense and receipt capture, and mapping to cost centers or departments.

How can we make better financial decisions with commercial card spend data?

Start by centralizing spend on a single commercial card that is integrated with a spend management platform and your ERP or accounting system. It enables you to capture accurate, data-rich insights such as vendor-level spend patterns, category trends, employee expense behavior, and more. With insights from card data, you can negotiate better supplier terms, identify cost-saving opportunities, and improve forecasting and resource allocation.

What card controls and compliance features are available for policy enforcement?

With a spend management platform like SVB’s, companies gain custom controls for commercial cards such as card-level and role-based budgets and timeframe, merchant category rules, transaction limits and more. You can also assign spend policies such as when receipts and approvals are required and automate policy enforcement. Using the system’s mobile app, cardholders will see alerts that block off-policy spending.

How can a corporate card program help us optimize spend (not just track it)?

For spend optimization, your corporate card should be integrated with an expense management platform (like SVB’s) that enables customizable card controls to reduce leakage and auto-enforce purchasing policies. Optimization features include configurable category/merchant controls, role-based and vendor-specific virtual cards and real-time alerts to prompt expense reporting. A robust platform can also deliver spend analytics such as top merchants, unusual transactions, policy exceptions, and reporting by department or project. Beyond just tracking spend, real-time controls and actionable insights help teams better allocate budgets, improve forecasting, and identify cost-savings opportunities.