- Use virtual cards to optimize spend data capture by embedding accounting codes upfront and centralizing card data for rich insights to improve cash control and financial planning.
- Unify travel expenses on a single corporate card program to capture spending analytics that help you better allocate travel budgets across departments and users and reduce unnecessary spend.
- Leverage supply chain spend data to consolidate vendors and negotiate lower pricing.
Amid the rapid pace of product development, marketing and sales, your company spending may be fast and furious. But to sustain growth, it’s essential to efficiently manage cash flow — and having data-rich insights can be especially valuable to improve budgeting and forecasting.
Many companies struggle with limited access to card data and may only see basic transaction details on a monthly statement. If that sounds familiar, it may be time to rethink your corporate card. When your card program is integrated with an AI powered spend management system, you can harness a wealth of data to better understand spending patterns, most-used vendors and categories, seasonal trends and more. Those analytics can make it easier to plan for the near-term and the months ahead.
Here's a 1-2-3 approach of actions you can take for optimize spend data for strategic use.
1. Increase spend data capture with virtual cards
Issuing virtual cards delivers multiple advantages from a data perspective. First, you can customize cards upfront so transactions will include reporting data such as GL codes, cost centers and project tags. No more time wasted on manual backtracking and guesswork, so reporting is faster and more accurate.
If your corporate card program supports mobile expense reporting and invoice integration, payment data automatically reports into your spend management platform in real time. Data then seamlessly streams to your ERP or accounting software. These automated data flows give you immediate access to richer data for spending analytics that can better inform your financial planning.
2. Improve travel management with card data
Once your organization adopts virtual cards, you can also put them to use to improve how you manage travel spending and budgeting. Instead of employees paying on their own for logistics and on-the-road expenses, issuing virtual cards makes life easier for everyone. It simplifies booking and automates reporting, plus it aggregates data about your travel spend.
Even if some of your travelers use plastic in your corporate card program, you can capture spend data when they submit expenses and receipts using the mobile app for your expense management system.
This spend data optimization enables more accurate forecasting with analytics such as average trip cost, in-policy trip ratio, most-used vendors and top travelers. Insights can help you reallocate travel budgets across departments and users and reduce unnecessary spend.
3. Leverage spend data to reduce vendor costs
Yet another win with spend data optimization is that it gives you a lever to renegotiate rates and terms with supply chain vendors and travel providers. By centralizing your corporate card spending and data management, you gain a more complete picture of where you spend the most.
Suppose you’ve grown rapidly and have multiple teams using different SaaS applications for project management, with subscriptions paid from individual or team cards, and sometimes reimbursing employees. If instead, you consolidate all that SaaS spend onto a single corporate card, you can better identify total costs across overlapping tools and consolidate vendors as well. From there you are positioned to negotiate with chosen SaaS providers for enterprise-level pricing that may save you money.
More and more, companies are treating card spend data as a strategic asset, not just a compliance necessity. Learn how SVB corporate cards can empower your business with efficient controls and data-driven insights for better cash flow management.