Businesses in the US depend on corporate credit cards as a critical tool in their cash management process, leading to a whopping $1.5 trillion in commercial card spend. However, this massive volume of transactions has placed immense pressure on primary card issuers, i.e., banks, to provide card transaction feeds and better visibility into card spend.
To even view a card transaction, businesses usually need to wait out the credit float period of up to 72 hours. And, if you are a small or medium-sized business, most banks or card programs do not even offer that. Instead, accounting teams would have to log in to the bank portal to see transactions manually and export data to reconcile the business credit card expenses.
Enter new-age spend management software with their cards
To tackle the problem of spend visibility, new-age spend management startups started issuing their corporate cards, bypassing the banks. The benefits include real-time spend visibility, notifications for the end-user, and cash flow control. However, these FinTech companies require minimum cash balances, ranging from $75,000 to $250,000. So, in reality, these cards are charge cards that don't support any balance rollover. They even have shorter credit periods ranging from a day to a month, depending on the client's cash balance.
Now, card-led spend management companies account for less than 10% of the US's overall $1.5 trillion commercial card spend. This means that if you are an accounting firm, your clients are more likely to use a commercial card issued by one of the leading banks. So, how do you solve this age-old problem of card transaction feeds and lack of spend visibility?
Fyle's real-time expense management on cards you already have
Fyle recently launched a real-time expense management solution for customers using small business credit cards in the US. It's one of the first expense management platforms to offer direct, real-time card transaction feeds to end-users of any credit card, with direct secure enrollment from the cardholder.
Instead of asking clients to switch to another card, Fyle integrates with existing business credit cards to provide a real-time expense management experience. The real-time transaction data from card feeds and receipts are reconciled and made ready for accounting, vastly reducing manual work for employees, finance teams, and accounting firms.
Fyle initially launched this solution for the Visa network and will support other networks over the next few quarters.
How Fyle gives the power back to CPAs
● Innovation-driven tech at no extra cost
Imagine a client swiping a business credit card at a Starbucks. They get a real-time notification for the spend and reply via text with the receipt. Fyle automatically scans the receipt and codes all expense data. The expense is then matched to the correct card transaction and categorized against charts of accounts in your accounting software.
Fyle's real-time expense management has made it this simple for CPAs to reconcile credit card expenses for their clients without depending on bank transaction feeds.
● Enhanced employee experience
Never run after employees for receipts again. With Fyle, submitting expenses becomes very simple. In addition, employees can track expenses from daily apps like Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and Microsoft Teams with a single click.
● Increased financial control and insight
With Fyle, you can catch duplicates, out-of-policy expenses, and manual errors before they are approved. Fyle's machine learning engine shows a red flag (internal or user-facing) depending on the client's expense reimbursement policies.
Additionally, you can gain insights into spending patterns, employee behavior, financial efficiency, and operational roadblocks. You can also easily download custom MIS reports and manage and track client SLAs on a single platform.
Switch to real-time expense management
Overall, the world has made great progress in technology, but expense management is still stuck in the 90s. Finance teams and accounting firms spend hours poring over excel sheets, switching between multiple software, and dealing with shoeboxes of receipts. With real-time expense management software, these challenges can be a thing of the past. If you'd love to see Fyle in action, schedule a demo with us to learn how you can reduce manual work and close books on time.
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