Virtual business credit cards for corporate spending
Virtual business credit cards for corporate spending
Introduction
Let’s face it, traditional corporate expense management is nothing short of painful. Employees might be sharing corporate cards, which makes accountability impossible, or they might have to wait for slow reimbursements. Either way, they have to save every receipt and fill out expense reports with confusing fields. Then managers and finance teams lose hours dealing with manual reviews and approvals, missing memos, and paper receipts. And those hassles lead to limited visibility into employee spending until month’s end – when it’s too late to stop unwanted expenses.
It's an inefficient, reactive, and error-prone process that bogs teams down. But thankfully there’s a better way. Many of today’s virtual business credit cards have intelligent spend management built in so you can proactively control spend and regain bandwidth to focus on what really matters.
What are virtual business credit cards?
A virtual business credit card is a uniquely generated digital card number for making secure online payments, as opposed to the traditional plastic physical credit card. Brex virtual corporate cards provide all the utility of physical corporate cards but with enhanced security, control, and real-time tracking capabilities for any spend need, from travel to invoice payments to operational purchases
Another plus with Brex is that virtual cards can be issued instantly. That means employees don’t have to wait for their card to arrive and companies don’t have to worry about the card being intercepted by the wrong person. Cards can also be edited and canceled instantly as well. Through Brex’s HRIS integrations, you can even have a virtual card automatically created and assigned when an employee joins your company – and automatically deactivated if they leave or change roles.
The benefits of using virtual business credit cards
Virtual business credit cards are transforming corporate financial management, providing advantages that far surpass those of conventional corporate cards. Here are some key benefits:
Enhanced security and fraud prevention
A recent Association for Financial Professionals survey found that over 80% of companies have faced payment fraud attempts. Virtual cards, meanwhile, accounted for just 3% of attempted fraud.
Traditional corporate credit cards can easily be shared, lost, or stolen. When a physical credit card becomes compromised, the account holder has to call to cancel it, wait for a new one to be issued, and then enter a dispute process. In some cases, the cardholder may not even be aware there has been a breach until they see fraudulent charges on their statement.
With a virtual card, the cancellation process is much faster and digital. Upon cancellation, the account holder can maintain access to their credit account through their physical card. Virtual cards can’t be lifted out of an employee’s wallet. And they can be frozen with a single tap or a click of a button.
Brex's virtual card solution is designed from the ground up to stop fraud in its tracks. For starters, Brex cards are backed by Mastercard ID Theft Protection™ which safeguards against identity theft with 24/7 fraud monitoring and for Zero Liability coverage.
Beyond that, Brex provides real-time expense tracking and uses AI to automatically flag unusually expensive or suspicious transactions. Unlike the spend alerts of legacy card programs that burden the account admins of large teams, Brex AI only flags what’s truly irregular according to your unique expense policy so you don’t have to review scores of standard purchases (more on that later).
And, with Brex’s customizable controls, finance teams can set spend limits with ultra-specific category, transaction, and merchant restrictions. For example, flight bookings can be capped by total cost with restrictions on airlines and travel class. If a fraudster (or an employee for that matter) attempts to book a first-class trip to Tahiti, it’ll be blocked automatically.
Another example — you can create a Brex virtual card that can only be used to pay a specific software bill each month. You set the exact spend limit and the vendor, and it will recur every month so the bill is always paid on time and you’re never overcharged.
Improved spend management and visibility
Effective spend management requires access to accurate, real-time financial data. Brex virtual cards provide the real-time expense tracking that finance teams need for total spend visibility.
With Brex, every transaction is automatically logged and categorized within the Brex expense management platform immediately for full line-of-sight into spend activity. Simply put, you can track and manage all your spend, all in one centralized place. With Brex’s budget feature, you will be able to see actual spend vs. budgets in real time, which improves accountability and allows you to shift spend in real time to where it can have the greatest impact.
Brex virtual business credit cards also take the hassle out of card management by preventing card sprawl. Some card companies tie each spend limit to a brand new card number, which can mean managing hundreds of unnecessary cards for large teams. Brex, however, offers a unique solution where employees can have multiple spend limits assigned to a single card. This allows for infinite use cases — from travel to stipends — making it easy to manage cards at scale.
Both Brex budgets and spend limits are built to work across global entities, eliminating friction as you scale. Brex also offers direct integrations with all the leading ERPs, including NetSuite, for seamless expense reconciliation.“Brex’s NetSuite integration is fantastic,” Fireblocks Corporate Controller John Smith said at a recent webinar. “Now we’re automating our monthly reconciliation across multiple entities with consistent mapping and total visibility into spend.”
Efficient approval workflows
Finance teams can set general spending limits with legacy corporate cards. That may be good enough for small businesses, but larger businesses and scaling businesses need a smarter solution that enables granular controls and eliminates manual reviews.
Virtual corporate cards from Brex eliminate the inefficient bottleneck of approvals that come with physical cards, from enabling spend to controlling it. With Brex, managers can proactively set spend limits and approval requirements by team, department, or individual. Instead of manual reviews that are prone to human error and delays, managers can enable customizable approval workflows to automatically approve in-policy budget expenses and spend requests while routing exceptions to the right approvers in the right order.
Brex makes it easy to configure approval rules for different teams or spending scenarios. For example, certain employees may need approval for any transactions above $200, while an account manager has a $1,000 limit for client entertainment purchases. Department heads can be assigned as approvers for all team spend requests, and multi-level approval chains can be created for purchases when necessary. This flexibility ensures proper control without unwanted blockers that slow the business down.
To put it another way — your VP of Finance doesn't want or need alerts for a Starbucks trenta iced coffee. With Brex, you can set the threshold for which charges require review. For instance, you might configure the system so that your VP only examines transactions over $1500, ensuring the right level of oversight without unnecessary micromanagement.
Increased team productivity
Traditional corporate card programs have cumbersome and slow-moving workflows. For example, new hires could be on the job for weeks before getting approved for a physical card and then must wait for it to arrive in the mail. Spend requests can require weeks of back-and-forth for approvals. With physical cards from legacy providers, every step is a friction point that drains productivity and creates unnecessary overhead.
Brex virtual cards, on the other hand, are ready to use as soon as they are generated. This way, new hires and remote employees don’t have to wait on the delivery of their physical cards. They also won’t have to deal with the hassle of tedious expense reporting, because their virtual cards have expense management built in with automated receipts from 1,000s of merchants.
Brex also makes life a whole lot easier for finance teams and managers. If an employee wants to know how much they can spend on tonight’s team dinner, they can open the Brex mobile app and ask their AI-powered expense assistant. Brex Assistant will let them know exactly how much they have left to spend, as well as any limitations.
Finance teams using Brex don’t have to field and answer questions for routine business expenses, saving hours every month. At the same time, employees are empowered to move quickly and focus on high-value activities instead of bureaucratic busywork.
Use cases for virtual business credit cards
Businesses leverage Brex virtual business credit cards to enable all types of purchases, including online advertising, software as a service (SaaS) subscriptions, vendor payments, team travel expenses, and more. With Brex, all transactions automatically feed into one unified spend management platform, giving finance leaders total visibility and control across all spend types.
Online advertising and marketing campaigns
Marketing teams can utilize virtual corporate cards to securely pay for online advertising campaigns, sponsored content, PPC advertising, and other digital media. Card usage can be restricted to authorized ad tech platforms with spend limits and approvals required for certain campaigns.
Those automated controls can maximize every dollar of ad spend on expensive Meta and Google campaigns. A virtual corporate card will also ensure timely payments to keep those ads in flight. Plus, with Brex, you can earn reward points for your ad spend and gain credits towards partnered ad tech vendors.
SaaS and cloud services
Virtual cards with customized spend permissions provide the perfect, balanced solution to automate subscription payments while maintaining oversight.
With Brex virtual cards, there's no need to manually approve essential SaaS subscriptions and recurring services every renewal cycle. You can also prevent runaway SaaS spend with advanced budget controls across invoices and p-cards. Want to ensure that you don’t renew a subscription next year? Simply set a deactivation date in advance via automated bill pay. Brex also prevents runaway vendor spend by enabling you to block unwanted spend categories while restricting spend to specific vendors.
Vendor payments and one-time purchases
Vendor payments don’t have to be such a hassle. Employees can use Brex virtual cards to manage vendor payments and save hours through bill pay automation. Plus, when you pay vendors via Brex card, your company will earn rewards on all vendor spend.
For one-time purchases, Brex virtual cards offer unparalleled flexibility and control. Whether it's new office equipment or software, you can quickly generate a virtual card with a specific spend limit tailored to the purchase. These one-time purchase cards can be set to deactivate automatically after use, preventing any unauthorized future charges.
Team travel and expenses
From meetings to company offsites, Brex virtual cards eliminate the loathsome roadblocks of business travel. With Brex, you can create a shared spend limit on group events and assign employees specific per diems for meals and entertainment. You can also create spend limits for work trips with embedded policies for flights, hotels, rental cars, and more. (Pro tip: T&E gets even easier when paired with Brex travel.)
How to apply for a virtual business credit card
Getting started with Brex virtual business credit cards is remarkably simple. It only takes a few minutes to sign up for Brex. After answering a few short questions, your Brex log in will be live and ready to use.
Onboarding is easy, especially with dedicated support from the implementation team and continued 24/7 Brex Support for any account questions. Once approved, you’ll be able to provision virtual Brex cards for your team through the online dashboard or mobile app. There’s no waiting period for physical card delivery, so your teams will be able to hit the ground running. And, with Brex, there’s no limit to how many virtual cards you can issue, so you can cover tens or even thousands of employees.
Brex offers corporate cards with built-in controls for free. Beyond that, Brex offers three distinct plans for growing companies, mid-sized companies looking to scale, and global enterprises. You can compare all the different features to find the plan that best fits your company.
Don't just manage expenses, optimize them
Outdated, manual expense management processes will only hurt your productivity and profitability. Brex virtual business credit cards can streamline your financial operations with:
Enhanced security: Virtual card technology maximizes fraud prevention and protects against misuse.
Improved spend visibility: Real-time data capture and tracking provides total transparency into corporate spending (No more ghost spend!)
Automated workflows: Automated approvals and accounting integrations eliminate manual work, enabling managers and employees to focus on the job at hand.
Finance leaders don’t have to settle for clunky corporate card programs and their costly inefficiencies. With Brex, you can have a powerful, user-friendly platform that empowers everyone to spend with confidence.