Business expenses made easy with prepaid cards

Every year, expense accounts represent more than 30 billion euros for companies. According to an analysis report by Oversight Systems, every year a company loses 5% of its revenues to fraud; 89% of this loss is linked to expense reimbursements! In addition to a significant loss of revenue, the automation of these expenses is not commonplace for companies, since today 59% of employees are not equipped with an expense report software (knowing that, on average, it takes 27 minutes for an employee to fill out an expense report: a considerable loss of working time and therefore productivity for companies).

The problem of business expenses

Recent studies show that 70% of today’s employees would like to benefit from an application dedicated to expense management; that expense processing costs can be reduced by 87%, and that the time required for processing could be divided by four, resulting in fewer errors and less fraud. Finally, 85% of SMEs have no management system in place!

As you can see, expense claims are a real headache for employers and their employees. Extremely time-consuming (and therefore costly in terms of lost productivity), susceptible to fraud and misuse of internal policies, costly and difficult to budget for…this reimbursement system is at the dawn of a new era with the democratisation of prepaid cards within companies.

Prepaid cards for easy management of business expenses

Today, thanks to the intervention of Programme Managers and the payment services they provide, merging financial and IT expertise is becoming accessible to all. Reloadable payment cards are becoming the must-have solution! A company can now regularly set aside a specific sum in a dedicated account for business expenses, in the form of “provisions”. Employees can spend this money using payment cards (Mastercard/Visa etc., physical or virtual) provided by the company. The company retains visibility of expenses incurred (in particular, it can validate or reject an expense request in advance, if necessary), and controls card issuance, recharging and management. It can manage all its business payment cards independently, without going through a bank, and transfer money from one card to another in real time. It also has access to precise reports, enabling errors, fraud and budget anomalies to be identified more quickly.

On a larger scale, a company whose customers are also businesses (BtoB) could provide branded payment cards, offering financial products and services to its customers. Example: a company whose core business is providing expense management services and tools, could supply prepaid payment cards to its customers to help them manage their business expenses.

These “ready-to-use” payment programmes, designed for business expenses, make it easy to automate expense reports. They bring together new, centralised, easy-to-use systems that free you from paper management and streamline your expense policy by eliminating fragmented, manual expense management processes.

Thanks to this new, fast and simple payment method, companies can better manage the budgets allocated to each employee or department, keep an eye on expenses in real time and therefore have better visibility on the strategies to adopt. No more need for employees to advance expenses, and no more time-consuming manual expense management. Budget management is fluid and free.