3 Reasons Employee Corporate Cards Are Good for Your Business
Collaborative spending solutions offer greater savings, control, and team engagement for growing companies.
At Rho, we believe the future of team spend includes priming your employees for success from the beginning and fostering a collaborative approach to finance.
In this post, we explore how distributing corporate cards across your team increases transparency and accountability, improves your employee experience, and ultimately saves you time and money.
Distributing employee cards increases transparency and accountability
With many corporate card programs, it’s often easier to have employees share a company card, since issuing new ones means calling the bank, running through bureaucratic details, and waiting for physical cards to be mailed. But sharing cards can lead to a number of problems, including:
Theft and loss
You may think it’s safer to circulate just one card among your team, but the reality is, the more times a card is passed around, the greater the risk of theft and loss.
The best case scenario (when the card eventually disappears) is having to cancel it and reorder a new one. The worst case scenario is racking up costly, fraudulent charges before anyone realizes the communal card is missing.
Surprise costs
When multiple employees use the same card, unexpected and unexplained costs are bound to arise—especially if there’s confusion or miscommunication around company purchasing procedures and approval chains.
Messy finances
Following a strict budget is an important part of running a profitable business, but it’s hard to plan and monitor your finances when you can’t clearly allocate and track your spending.
For instance, you may forget about a large, pre-approved charge for one employee that maxes out the card, affecting another employee’s ability to make an essential purchase and leading to jumbled budgets, uneven resources, and resentful teams. Sooner or later, your finance team will find they’re missing receipts (and answers) for major company expenses and become bottlenecked trying to figure it all out.
On the other hand, giving employees their own cards–with proper controls in place–leads to greater visibility and accountability across the board.
A virtual Rho Card can be assigned and activated in minutes with customized rules, preset budgets, and auto-enforced limits. From there, all purchases are reported in real-time on a centralized dashboard and categorized by card holder or expense channel—so controllers always know who’s spending and on what.
Plus, charges are easy to track down and reconcile, since employees can text, email, or upload receipts instantly.
Distributing employee cards improves your team’s experience
Gone are the days when employees have to fill out reimbursement forms and wait to collect funds they technically lent to their employer. When they’re given their own cards, they don’t have to make necessary business purchases out-of-pocket, which can add up to thousands of dollars.
With the Rho Card, business owners and team leads can:
Effortlessly assign spending limits in real time for specific users, budgets, and teams
Extend stipends for common categories like travel, ad spend, and materials
Label transactions to track spend across departments and projects
Take our partners at Glowbar. As they opened new studios and grew their team from four to 40, the Rho Card’s collaborative model allowed managers to oversee their own P&L, manage independent budgets, and easily track their spend.
“As a multi-unit retail company, it’s awesome for our team to feel they have ownership over an account,” said Rachel Liverman, Glowbar’s founder and CEO. “Partnering with Rho enables that. Between all the user controls, you can really tailor it to your business needs.”
A big part of employee satisfaction depends on mutual respect. Ultimately, entrusting employees with corporate cards affords them both privilege and responsibility and boosts overall morale.
Distributing employee cards saves you time and money
When you spend through a modern platform like Rho, you earn as you scale. As more of your employees make more business purchases, you’ll earn more cash back (up to 1.75%). And unlimited physical and virtual Rho cards come at no cost.
Through our integrated platform, the Rho Card also syncs with our smart AP tools that help you automate your company’s finances—from data entry and payments to reporting and reconciliation–saving your finance team from being mired in minutiae.
The new way of doing business
Corporate cards shouldn’t be strictly for senior leadership or extended to employees as a “perk.”
Empowering your team’s spending is good for your business. That’s why Rho makes it easy with fee-free, unlimited physical and virtual cards bolstered through fine-tuned controls.
Grow with Rho
Ready to empower your team with secure employee cards? Read up on our clever corporate cards to learn more about the benefits they offer for high-growth businesses.
Or, reach out to one of our specialists to see how you can make the most of your team’s expenses.
