- A health check to optimize your corporate card program helps scaling companies increase spend control, automate finance workflows and improve data-driven decision-making.
- The health check evaluates key areas of your card program setup, such as system integrations, data intelligence, spend optimization, and expense policies and controls.
- Corporate card program optimization can help improve cash flow and spend compliance and unlock cost-saving opportunities across finance processes and vendor management.
When is it time to optimize your corporate card?
Fast-growth businesses should focus on corporate card program optimization when your original setup no longer matches how you operate today. When you set up the program a year or two ago, you had different needs, fewer employees, and simpler finance workflows. But what worked well for a 15-person startup may be draining productivity and cash flow for a 100-person scale-up. That’s why periodic card program optimization is essential.
Pitfalls to avoid as you outgrow your card program
If your company is expanding at a rate of 50%+ annually, older processes for managing corporate cards and expenses can result in inefficiencies that hinder your growth. For starters, it gets harder to keep spending on-budget and in-policy. You may have many employees using company and personal cards, which gives you little or no visibility into that spend until it’s too late.
The next huge problem is manual expense reporting. Compiling reports and receipts derails employee time and focus from important work, and manual reconciliation can cost your finance team hours each month. Add to that, the time-intensive effort of manually transferring expense data into your accounting system or ERP, a common challenge when fixing inefficiencies in commercial card programs. Yet you need all that data to close monthly books and prepare budgets and cash forecasting.
Optimizing with a commercial card health check
A commercial card health check can help you identify how to evolve your card program, so it delivers more value for your teams and your cash flow. What does it include? I recommend that clients look at four core areas of how they manage spend. Here’s a snapshot to jumpstart your thinking.
4-part health check for card program optimization
Whether your program needs a simple tune-up or major improvements, a corporate card health check evaluates four critical areas to identify optimization opportunities. Each area examines your current setup, what’s needed to get more value, and specific action items to optimize your card program.
1 – System Integration: Is your spend data connected?
Data integration is the first factor in a health check, because it’s commonly overlooked. Many fast-paced companies are still manually juggling between financial systems. The result is limited and delayed visibility for accounting and tracking your cash position. Consider the following questions:
- Does transaction data hit your ERP automatically in real time?
- Do you spend more than 2 hours weekly on card data entry?
- Can you close books without waiting for expense cleanup?
Your answers may reveal two crucial needs. First, your card program should be integrated with a spend management platform (like with SVB). And second, that platform should be integrated with your accounting software or ERP. Integrating your financial systems enables automation for real-time visibility and hyper-efficient processes that eliminate manual work and errors.
2 – Data Intelligence: How well can you use spending data?
Next, we look into whether you’re gaining the advantages of data-rich spending insights. Like many businesses, you may be used to having only minimal data in siloes, which isn’t much help. With centrally connected spend data, however, you gain financial intelligence that unlocks value. In particular, instant transaction-level data and insights on spending patterns let you identify how to optimize card spend controls and cash flow management.
A card program health check can level-set where you are vs. where you need to be. Think about some common finance data scenarios. Can you generate breakdowns on department spend in under 5 minutes, or are you still wrangling with spreadsheets? What about vendor contracts? Do you have a complete picture of where you spend the most to help you negotiate better terms and rates?
With optimized data flows, you can also dig into metrics to measure ROI in your card program. For example, track commercial card KPIs like Cost Savings Rate. It shows how much you're saving by automating workflows such as expense reporting and reconciliation to help prove the value of your corporate card program.
3 – Spend Optimization: Are you maximizing your card program?
The next area to focus on is how you’re using your commercial card today, and where you can optimize to capture more business value. For instance, are you using company cards for at least 80% of business expenses? You might have vendors you still pay by check or ACH, or employees using personal cards and getting reimbursed. But when you think about vendor management and cash back card rewards, you could be leaving money on the table.
With a card program health check, I help clients explore a variety of strategies for spend optimization. One aspect is looking at which suppliers you might transition to paying by card. It’s a powerful way to streamline procure-to-pay processes with cost-saving efficiency to help offset rising prices in your supply chain. Using your corporate card for vendor payables also gives your cash flow a lift, by providing more float with extended payment terms (up to 55 days with SVB).
And don’t forget cash back rewards. Card program optimization helps ensure you earn value on every dollar you spend.
4 – Policy and Controls: Is all your spend on-budget and compliant?
The fourth critical component of a commercial card program health check takes a granular look at your expense policies and cardholder limits. As your company scales up, card controls you set up in earlier days may no longer support today’s reality. Now you need stronger financial oversight for more predictable cash flow, and well-documented compliant spending for audit-ready reporting.
Are you able to enforce spending limits and policies in real time? If not, one of the most important steps in card program optimization is to issue virtual cards. It enables you to immediately meet purchasing needs, while setting custom limits for any user or use case. Think about business travel. You can issue travel expense cards with a fixed budget and timeframe for general use or a single conference. Embed expense codes, set policies such as thresholds for submitting receipts, and even add Merchant Category Code (MCC) restrictions to block off-policy spend like luxury personal services. Providing guardrails around usage helps keep corporate spend compliant and on-budget.
On top of more spend control and compliance, using virtual cards makes life easier for employees and your finance team. It enables automated mobile expense reporting that dramatically saves time and simplifies reconciliation. It’s a huge efficiency win to better support your next leaps in growth.
Ready to see how a card program health check can make a difference for your business? At SVB, we offer a complimentary review to help you optimize your commercial card, so you can stay focused on what you do best.
Frequently asked questions
How can we make better financial decisions with card spend data?
Start by centralizing spend on a single corporate 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.
How do we update corporate card policies for a scaling business?
Update corporate card policies by analyzing spending patterns, most used expense categories, and exceptions over the past 12-18 months. These insights help you decide how to refresh existing policies and add new ones, such as pre-approval thresholds, acceptable merchant categories and approved vendors, and when receipts are required. Factor in common scenarios like remote work expenses, SaaS subscriptions, client entertainment and business travel expenses. Give employees clear, documented guidelines and leverage your spend management platform to auto-enforce policies as card activity occurs.
How can we issue virtual cards to employees?
When your commercial card program is integrated with a spend management platform (like with SVB), you can issue virtual cards from the platform. In minutes, you can create a card for a specific user or use case, and customize the budget, timeframe, expense codes and allowable categories, and more. You might also be able to assign expense policies and automate preapprovals as needed for each virtual card.
How can we use virtual cards to improve compliance?
Virtual cards can simplify expense policy compliance by enabling you to assign a preset budget, timeframe, expense categories, usage policies and more to limit how each card can be used. As an example, you could issue travel expense cards for general use or a single conference, embed department-specific expense codes, set policies such as thresholds for submitting receipts, and add Merchant Category Code (MCC) restrictions to block off-policy spend like luxury personal services.
