Solving 3 top finance challenges with business expense management

The finance team faces unique challenges as a high-growth company rapidly scales. Manual processes break, disconnected systems lead to fragmented data, approvals get lost in Slack threads, and all of this eats up precious time. These are the symptoms and with the right data and tools you can tackle the underlying finance challenges.

Challenge #1: Strengthening policy compliance and expense control

With a rapid pace of growth, employees have aggressive targets to hit. They expect to make quick purchase decisions and not get held up waiting for approvals. As their team grows, new people get added to the mix. More people are spending on behalf of the company– with more business travel, more AI subscriptions, and more co-working space. While disciplined spending may be on everybody’s radar, it is easy for spend to get out of control.

When it comes to company spending, what is tougher are some of the gray areas. Business class flights might be allowed, but only under strict conditions. SaaS subscriptions are a necessity, but the company may want to qualify for volume discounts with a preferred vendor. When employees wander too far into the gray zone their spending can create compliance risks and audit red flags. The key is to enforce the policy before the spend happens.

With a commercial card, you can benefit from specialized tools and expertise. An integrated business expense management platform enables you to define pre-set expense controls. This might include restrictions that prevent certain transactions based on Merchant Category Codes (MCC), dollar limits, vendor, employee roles, and other factors you select. You can also reduce fraud risk by restricting card transactions to your approved vendors and suppliers. At SVB, our card team helps clients document guidelines for corporate card usage and policies for managing business expenses.

Challenge #2: Gaining real-time visibility with expense management

As I work with our clients in the innovation economy, I see that as companies grow, the complexity of managing finance can grow even faster. Manual expense reporting and reconciliation is too time-consuming and error prone to keep up. This can be a high-risk approach to managing business expenses.

A commercial credit card with integrated spend management provides instant transaction-level data. This helps the finance team to spot trouble spots as they arise, not after a monthly statement. Optimizing working capital is critical to companies at every stage of growth. Real-time spending data enables finance teams to better support the needs of the business as priorities shift.

Challenge #3: Identifying spending trends and strategic insights

Ask any finance team and they can probably reel off a list of pain points they have regarding their limited visibility into spending patterns: delayed transaction data, manual entry errors, inadequate reporting systems, use of personal cards, and more. With centralized, enriched, card data you can surface spending patterns. And in turn, this helps to support strategic objectives like renegotiating big-ticket vendor agreements and increasing the agility of budgeting and financial planning.

But first, you must free up some bandwidth for your finance staff. (For more on that, check out my article on the importance of finance process automation.)

Expense management is a 2X win for your finance team. Tactically, transactions can be auto categorized, data seamlessly syncs to your ERP, and you close the books faster. Strategically, company credit card data equips teams to analyze vendor relationships, identify cost saving opportunities, and discover potential fraud and risk indicators.

Solving top challenges is the secret sauce behind SVB commercial card programs. Our business expense management solutions are tailored for fast-growth businesses and help to save time and reduce costs.