Key takeaways
  • Driving growth opportunities relies on a balancing act of enabling rapid procurement across distributed teams, while maintaining financial oversight and control.
  • Preparing for the unexpected is critical so businesses can tackle new production demands, equipment needs, or supply chain challenges.
  • Speeding procurement with virtual cards creates the agility to instantly issue policy-controlled cards, and automate approvals, expense reporting and reconciliation.

Fast-growing companies often experience unexpected production demands, equipment needs, or supply chain challenges that require quick purchasing decisions. Waiting a week or two to get a corporate card or purchase order approvals could mean critical delays and missed opportunities.

When companies rely on agility, how can you balance the need for speed with a need for a formalized procurement process to keep control over finances?

Think instant-issue corporate procurement cards. They empower your employees with immediate purchasing power, while ensuring your finance team can maintain oversight and auto-enforce budgets and spend policies.

Why businesses need instant-issue procurement cards for unexpected demands

In the fast pace of innovation economy companies, the unexpected can be a good thing – if you’re prepared to take advantage of it. And if there’s a hurdle, you need to be ready to leap over it and keep moving. Even with precise planning, it’s not always easy to see around the curve where teams may need to procure in a hurry. Here are a few examples:

  • If a tech startup lands an enterprise client, they may need to immediately invest in new servers, licenses, or cloud capacity. Meeting SLAs is key to ensuring the new client relationship has a strong start.
  • Manufacturers might receive an unexpectedly high volume of orders. What if they have to scramble to get more hardware components that come from overseas? They may need to pre-pay suppliers and get expedited shipping to meet deadlines. But it’s worth it to secure the sales revenue and preserve reputation as they establish their brand.
  • A biotech firm might need to accelerate the timeline for clinical trials. It’s an opportunity to reach regulatory milestones sooner, but only if they have everything in place on time. It may be vital to quickly procure more lab equipment, kits, or medical-grade storage. Avoiding delays is crucial to stay on track for approvals and investor confidence.
  • For research labs that rely on consumables like pipettes, what if supplies run low and shipments get stalled? It may be imperative to buy from other suppliers right away, so experiments continue uninterrupted.

While every business is unique, they all need agile spending processes to stay on track for success. That’s where instant-issue corporate procurement cards can make all the difference.

How virtual cards procurement increases business agility

Traditional business credit cards are not built for company realities. To keep the balls rolling, a robust corporate card program helps you meet procurement needs in the moment, yet in a policy-controlled way:

  • Take action faster with virtual cards procurement. Clarify the user and purpose, assign custom budgets, vendor categories, cost center codes, pre-approvals and more. You can issue for one-time or multi-use, a fixed timeframe, etc. And with randomly generated numbers, virtual cards are more secure to shield your main card account against fraud.
  • Save time with automated expense reporting. Another big win of virtual cards is that staff can submit expenses and receipts via web or mobile as procurement occurs. That means people can stay focused on important work instead of burning up time compiling manual expense reports. It also makes life easier for your finance team by automating reconciliation.
  • Automate supplier payments. As your company grows, it’s helpful to even further through a vendor enablement program. You can onboard preferred suppliers directly into your procurement system to automate payments for purchase orders and invoices. It can help your business meet needs quickly and strengthen supplier relationships with fast, predictable payment.
We can issue a virtual card in under 60 seconds, from when we approve it until it's in the employee’s inbox, so it’s very easy to enable our people on the fly to do what they do best.
VP Finance, Omnidian (SVB Client)

At SVB, we’re committed to helping innovators stay agile and efficient to drive growth. Learn how SVB commercial cards with AI-powered spend management can fuel procurement and improve cash control.