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How would you rather spend your time at the end of the month: emailing back and forth with your client for several hours to track down expense reports and receipts, or creating a cash flow analysis for your client using expense data that was collected as each transaction occurred?
Many of the expenses you need to reconcile on each expense report will occur on a corporate credit card—which your client might have chosen based on its rewards. But only certain employees are able to make purchases on the company card. There will be some inevitable expenses on employees’ personal cards that require reimbursement.
Unfortunately, you and your client only have visibility in arrears, instead of a clear picture of what they (and their employees) are spending in the moment. This spend may not adhere to the company’s expense policy—which leads to an awkward rejection of the reimbursement—and you can’t tell how much is spent until after the fact. Your staff can’t project client cash flow and clients can't enforce their budgets before spend occurs.
What you need is a tool that will give your firm real-time visibility and empower your clients to enforce their budgets and stay on top of spend.
A card and software that work together
That’s why BILL Spend & Expense uses a charge card tied to our software. The card reports each transaction to the software as it happens, so that managers, admins, and accounting professionals can see the data in real time. The software prevents the card from spending unauthorized funds by requiring managers to assign funds to the card—it won’t work otherwise! Your client has total control over how their money is spent and you get real-time visibility into their spend.
The app tracks each expense as it comes in and prompts each spender to attach a receipt right then and there, which means each expense is reported immediately and eliminates traditional expense reports. With everything happening in one program, plus automatic integrations with the most popular accounting software, your staff can close each client’s books faster than before—even weekly.
Using a card directly tied to your clients’ spend management software allows your client to control their budget better than using business credit cards. Each employee receives a card, empowering them to make purchases for the business, but only with authorized funds. They no longer need to spend their own money (without supervision) and wait for reimbursement. Your client can ensure each transaction adheres to their spend policy before it occurs—so employees won’t be able to spend what isn’t already approved. On top of this, your client now gets to reap the rewards their employees were formerly receiving for each purchase. Every single purchase now benefits the company.
These features all happen because the BILL Divvy Corporate Card exists within our software system. Traditional cards and expense management systems might provide one of these aspects, such as virtual cards or immediate receipt uploads. But the real magic of BILL Spend & Expense is that the card and software together provide you with real-time data and significant time savings, and empowers your clients with controlled spend and robust rewards.
Since the transactions are occurring in-app and don’t require a separate upload process, you and your client can see each purchase as it happens. This real-time insight will give you and your clients crystal clear understanding of their business expenses and, and the automatic syncs to your accounting software will allow your firm to better advise each client and make recommendations for the future. Making end of month for you and your clients smoother than ever before plus enabling you to better forecast and advise on their business finances.
