Corporate vs. Business Credit Card: What is the Difference?

In the realm of business operations, effective spend management is crucial for maintaining a healthy financial bottom line. Businesses grappling with inefficient spending control face risks that can substantially impact their financial stability. 

For example, poor invoicing practices that cause a delay in payment can lead to contract management issues or, even worse, a lost client for your business. It also might cause issues with some of your preferred suppliers if they feel they’re not being paid on time. 

Making a slip-up that disrupts a subscription can mean your company lacks access to critical software or tools until the issue is fixed.

A poor expense report system means charges incurred on your business trip might result in many follow-up questions, so your accounts payable team is on the same page with purchase orders. A system without real-time visibility for spending data is not ideal for any organization and does not make it easy to reduce spend.

Intelligent spend management helps prevent these issues. A business uses spend management to comprehensively track and review organizational-wide spending and purchase orders down to the last dirham. 

In this post we will deep dive into spend management and discuss the best ways to properly manage it. 

What is spend management?

Spend management refers to the systematic process of tracking, analyzing, and controlling an organization's total expenditure. It encompasses all aspects of business spending, including invoicing, contract management, subscription services, and expense reporting. 

The goal of spend management is to enhance financial stability by providing real-time visibility into all financial transactions and purchase orders. This comprehensive approach enables businesses to identify inefficiencies, reduce unnecessary expenses, and maintain strong relationships with suppliers and clients.

The Importance Of Spend Management

Effective spend management is crucial for a company's financial health and operational efficiency. Neglecting careful expenditure tracking or allowing excessive indirect spending can lead to significant revenue loss, risking even the most well-planned business strategies. Managing costs and enhancing efficiency becomes challenging when financial processes are time-intensive and complex.

A report by McKinsey highlights the critical nature of this issue, noting that external spending on suppliers typically represents 40-80% of a company's total expenses. This statistic underscores the vital importance of meticulous spending control. Furthermore, the process of reviewing and optimizing expenditures can have a substantial impact on employee workloads, indicating the far-reaching effects of spend management.

Adopting robust spend management practices enables companies to achieve greater financial stability and avert potential crises. Implementing a system that tracks and monitors all financial transactions ensures that expenditures are fully accounted for, reducing the likelihood of wastage. In summary, efficient spend management is not just about cost control; it is a strategic approach that influences every aspect of a company's operations and contributes significantly to its long-term success.

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Advantages Of Digital Spend Management

In this day and age, using an online tool to keep track of your expenses should be a no-brainer. Let’s have a look at some of the main advantages.

1. Insight Into Everyday Expenditures 

Where is every dirham your company makes going? If you don’t know, digital spend management will dramatically strengthen financial accountability, budgeting, and expenses. In addition, reporting on where company funds are flowing makes it much simpler to see how different department heads oversee budgets. Read more on how to improve internal control over financial reporting.

2. Stronger Financial Controls 

Spend management tools like Pluto, allow you to not only monitor your spending in real-time but also set the limits on the go. In addition to that you can issue cards for departments or individuals, and even focus them on a particular type of usage, such as specific vendors only. 

3. Budget optimization 

Effective spend management is a great solution to ensure a better-looking budget. Analyzing and managing spending makes it simple to find and cancel unneeded services, negotiate lower prices with new supplier contracts, and never have to pay a late fee again. It will also significantly help your board of directors as they’ll have a simplified, streamlined budget to review and discuss at the start of the year. 

Common Spend Management Challenges 

It’s easy to pursue spend management practices that hurt your business’s bottom line if you’re not careful. Many ‘traditional’ best practices might not fit companies with remote-first work policies, engage in cutting-edge industries, or have an unorthodox structure.

If your company has a dynamic structure, spend management becomes all the more important to help you keep up with the competition and get the most value out of every dirham spent. 

Keep these potential challenges in mind as you pursue spend management practices. 

1. Relying On Old Spending Data

Be wary of relying on old budgets or financial data when managing more spend. It’s challenging for leadership to identify problem areas with cash inflows or outflows, when they only have outdated information.

2. Over reliance On Manual Mapping 

Having to go back at the end of the month to match spending to budgets manually can take an inordinate amount of hours and opens the door to errors and mistakes that can throw off a spend management policy. 

Pluto helps to automatically match spend to budgets in real-time, ensuring accounting and finance teams have accurate updates. 

3. Harnessing Too Much Technology

Modern financial software can dramatically help your company’s day-to-day operational flow. However, if these solutions do not work together, chaos can ensue which leads to data migration and processing errors. Pluto integrates with your accounting tools, cutting the data flow time significantly. 

4. Outdated Processes

The post-COVID world of remote and digital work means your employees might be scattered across the globe and in different time zones. Having to arrange shared corporate cards manually or coordinate team spending with employees in different locations can be tricky. Pluto offers unlimited virtual cards, which allow you to provide a payment channel for any employee anywhere in the world. 

How To Improve Your Spend Management Process

Optimizing your spend management process might seem tricky at first glance. Fortunately, small and large businesses often rely on the same core strategies to optimize spending. 

1. Rely On Spend Management Software: Pluto can help automatically track expenses, keep abreast of budgeting, and help manage strategic sourcing. CEOs and CFOs then have relevant, real-time data at their fingertips to see where their company is financially. 

2. Focus On A Few Payment Methods: Do you have too many company cards in your pocket? It might be time to streamline purchasing methods to help simplify your spend management strategy. For example, your business can dramatically improve expense tracking by asking employees to only use company cards for business expenses instead of asking for their personal cards to be reimbursed. 

3. Have An Organized Approval Process: You can clarify your spending process (you might want to check our post on how to create a corporate card policy)  by ensuring employees have a clear hierarchy of how and by whom purchases need to be approved. If your team is unclear, they might complicate the payment process by not filing the right reports, which means your financial team could be left in the dark about purchases. 

6 Efficient Spend Management Strategy Tips

Your company needs to optimize its spend management strategy to ensure the final results lead to reduced procurement costs, improved efficiency, and streamlined workflows. 

Spend management best practices also help improve vendor relationships and communication, procure the optimal goods and services your business needs, and even help you earn volume and early payment discounts due to more effective and simplified financial practices. 

Keep the following steps in mind for the best results regardless of your organization’s industry or size. 

1. Calculate Expenses

Do you know exactly where employees spend company funds? If not, you’ll need to build a comprehensive list of company expenses, suppliers, and entities where funds are going. 

This might quickly become a challenge if you’re in charge of a large business. If so, look to designate specific team members to review employee salaries, utilities, marketing, training, and all other day-to-day expenses to have the most detailed list. 

You can’t improve what you do not measure. You can use Pluto to get a firm grip on your expenses. Pluto allows you to monitor and control your expenses so you clearly see how much was spent in which category. 

2. Confirm Data

You’ll want to ensure all accrued expense data is accurate and can be cross-checked with receipts and inventory records. Ensuring transaction data is precise, and expense lists are free of duplicates, spelling mistakes, and other mistakes makes the entire spend management process more efficient. 

Take this step extremely seriously if your company spend practices have relied on more manual processing methods. Standardization ensures that multiple currencies, formatting differences, and other nuances are accounted for when looking at spend analysis data. 

(Goes without saying that when using Pluto this is all pre-done for you!)

3. Categorize Information

While optimal spend management brings all expenditures under a single umbrella to review, your team will still want to categorize expenses into various groups to make reviewing and making adjustments across different departments simpler. 

It’s usually best to categorize expenses in multiple ways to understand where money is going. Pluto allows you to categorize expenses both through specialized cards or just by tagging, so everything is nicely grouped together when it is review time. 

4. Review Expenses

A well-thought-out process of calculating, verifying, and categorizing spending information will simplify your entire review process when you’re looking at spend data. 

You should immediately be able to spot expenses that are anomalies or recurring spending that might be able to be cut out from the start. 

Pluto’s dashboard can give you a high level but also a detailed view, so you can clearly identify trends and separate expenses.

5. Devise A Strategy

You’ll want to move decisively once you’ve identified potential changes to spending habits and department budgeting approaches. 

It might seem difficult at first glance to start reducing budgets, cutting out vendors, or make other dramatic changes to your company’s budget and expense habits. Rely on good change management practices and your leadership team to cultivate employee and stakeholder buy-in to any adjustments.

6. Practice Good Data Forecasting

Keep updating your expense data as you make a budget and spending adjustments. Doing so keeps your team on top of where funds are going and can help forecast different spending scenarios and how they might impact your business’s bottom line. 

Keeping data and information updated becomes particularly important if your expenses grow to ensure financial operations run smoothly. Don’t forget to cultivate supplier relationships if you work with different vendors for optimal inventory management.

Should You Rely On Spend Management Software? 

Manually processing expense claims, keeping up with petty cash, and tracking company credit cards can quickly turn inefficient, hinder your company’s financial management, and inhibit the overall procurement process.

In contrast, the right spend analysis solution can aid real-time expense tracking, provide easy-to-read charts and graphs of high-level expenses, and capture and store financial-related documents, so your finance team members are not scrambling to find a receipt or report. 

Pluto has a multitude of features including procurement software and account payable that will help you with spend management and make spend control much easier.

1. Flexibility

Pluto allows you to create cards for various purposes, edit spending limits on the go and monitor your expenses in real time. This allows you to scale up or down depending on what your business needs at any given moment.

2. Powerful Analytics

With Pluto, you will be able to track spending patterns and areas of high expenditure and get real-time insights into your business finances. The powerful analytics will help you make better decisions about where to allocate your resources.

3. Ease Of Use

The main bottleneck of many spend management platforms is that the employees do not use them - as it is just too time-consuming. Not with Pluto!  The sleek and user-friendly interface makes expense management a breeze.

4. Simplified Reimbursements

Receipt upload and reimbursements can be quite a burden for the team. Pluto allows you to take pictures of receipts with your phone and just add them to your reimbursements list. With the use of categories and tags, you will be able to both submit and review them in record time!

Key Takeaways For Company Spending

Spend management remains an essential component of all organizations regardless of size. Accountability for every dirham flowing in and out ensures your company maximizes revenue and remains growth-focused, no matter the budget.

You can take the first step today by relying on Pluto and processes to establish control over budgets, track spending, manage payments, cut costs, and boost your financial team’s day-to-day operations and processes.

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From receiving goods to clearing payments, it is not a single-click process. Multiple steps in between make the accounts payable process tedious and time-consuming.

You receive goods, match them with purchase orders and invoices, send the invoices for approval, make the payment, and finally, maintain records for bookkeeping. This process alone takes weeks and creates confusion when multiple stakeholders are involved.

Think about purchases above $50,000. There are multiple approvals, and each purchase triggers a unique workflow. Documents are not consolidated, and no one has a clear idea of the payment status. 

Thus, accounts payable become chaotic.

Can You Automate Accounts Payable?

To streamline your accounts payable process, you can use tools to automate it. This will simplify bill payments and give you more visibility and control over money.

While it will take time for stakeholders and employees to embrace automation, you can consolidate your scattered pieces on a centralized platform. If you are looking for suitable AP automation tools for your company, check out our list of the top accounts payable automation software.

This post will delve deeper into how you can automate the accounts payable process and how it will help your business. 

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What is the Accounts Payable Automation Process?

Accounts payable automation uses tools to automate invoice verification, approval workflow, payment processing, and bookkeeping. 

Instead of manually organizing, matching, approving, and clearing invoices, the entire process goes on a digital platform to provide visibility and control at each step. So, earlier, employees would spend hours getting approvals and days clearing payments, but now, an automation tool reduces the invoice processing time. 

The platform captures and extracts the invoice from emails via optical character recognition (OCR). The invoice goes to the platform with all the critical information, such as purchase order and simplifies three-way matching. A trigger-based approval workflow notifies the stakeholders to approve invoices. The admin gets complete visibility of each step and clears the payment without going through a variety of software. 

How to Automate Accounts Payable

Automating accounts payable is as simple as choosing and integrating the right automation software with your existing accounting and procurement software.  

The automation software offers visibility into where the money is going and control over the entire process. You can customize the approval workflows and payment gateways and create an ecosystem that supports your procurement process. You can accommodate manual processes and integrate them with other software without going through a complete flip.

With the right automation software, you bring all the critical stages of accounts payable on a centralized platform. Here are the five key steps you can automate:

1. Invoice Management

Manual: The vendor sends an invoice to a dedicated email or a physical copy via fax or mail. The employee receives it and moves from one stakeholder to another for approval. The process is delayed for days if any manager is unavailable. Once the approval is complete, all the documents go to the accounting team, who clears the payment. 

Automated: Depending on how the vendor sends the invoice, the automation platform captures the invoice from email or WhatsApp. If you receive a physical invoice, you can upload the invoice, and the system extracts all the vital information via OCR. There's no need to manually enter details or add a general ledger (GL) and taxation code. The system captures, extracts, and consolidates all the invoices.

2. GRN Matching

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Manual: The dedicated team receives goods along with the goods receipt note (GRN) and must match it with the invoice and purchase order. This ensures that the specified goods are received as per the purchase order. Manually, this process is prone to errors, leading to discrepancies. It demands accuracy to ensure you receive the correct items in specified quantities. 

Automated: Automated software makes this easy by combining all the relevant documents on a single platform. The dedicated team has the invoice and purchase order side by side, making it easy to compare items, purchase orders, and invoices for three-way matching. As a result, spotting discrepancies becomes more manageable, reducing the chances of errors.

3. Approval Workflow

Manual: Once the invoice is received, the employee gets it approved by dedicated managers. Based on the invoice amount, they need more than a single approval. Manually, this means going from one office to another or delving into long threads of email or Slack conversations. It becomes difficult for accounting teams to track approval and clear payments. 

Automated: With automated software, each invoice triggers an approval workflow for relevant stakeholders to approve the payments. The admin can create custom no-code workflows based on different if-then rules. For instance, marketing purchases above $50,000 will have more approvals than expenses of $5,000. Also, all the relevant teams will have visibility into the approval status, making it easier to clear payments on time without confusion.

4. Payment Processing

Manual: Once the invoice is approved, the accounting team determines the details and pays via checks, cards, or other payment methods. It takes a few days before the payment is cleared, and the teams need to sync all the information across the accounting software for reconciliation.

Automated: With automation, accounting teams and employees enjoy more flexibility. For instance, Pluto offers corporate cards, payment gateway integration, and a digitization platform for bookkeeping.

• With corporate cards, you can create custom vendor-specific cards with advanced controls to ensure payments are made only for approved vendors.
• Pluto integrates directly with your payment gateways to facilitate payment within the platform. 
• If you make payments via checks or other physical modes, Pluto will act as a digital bookkeeping platform. You can enter the payments made on the centralized platform and ensure that all the information is streamlined. 

5. Reconciliation

Manual: Reconciliation is the messiest part of accounts payable. Teams must maintain records, manually enter all the details, and sync them across the accounting platforms and ERPs. It is time-consuming, prone to errors, and tricky in case of purchases where one invoice invites multiple tax and GL codes.   

Automated: Automation consolidates all the information on a single platform without manual data entry. It uses OCR to extract all the critical information with a feature to upload the invoices in bulk. Further, you can split the transactions to add multiple tax and GL codes to address the audit season rush.

How Accounts Payable Automation Simplifies the Procurement Process

Accounts payable automation is not just for the procurement or the accounting department. It also makes it easier for stakeholders to approve the payments and employees to get timely resources.

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Overall, it assists you in bringing together scattered parts of the procurement process. Here are reasons why you must invest in accounts payable automation:

1. Improve Compliance

You get complete visibility and control over your accounts payable. You can create custom workflows to ensure that any purchase that goes against the company policy is rejected. You can also accommodate intricate hierarchies to suit your organization's needs and get timely approvals.

2. Avoid Double Payments

It is usual for teams to end up paying the same invoice twice as no one has visibility into the payment status. It happens when the same invoice is paid twice by different team members or when vendors send the same invoice twice, and both get paid. You can avoid this as the software detects duplicate invoices and gives visibility into the status of invoices. The main dashboard highlights the pending invoices and the ones awaiting approval. It becomes easy to stay on top of all the invoices and avoid errors.

3. Faster Approvals and Matching

You get a trigger-based no-code approval workflow engine where you can create customized workflows to accommodate intricate hierarchies. The software notifies the stakeholders to review and approve the invoices. Since all the information is available on a single dashboard, two-way or three-way matching is a matter of a few minutes. This accelerates the approval process, and payments are disbursed much faster. It improves the vendor relationship without risking over, under, or delayed payments.

4. Better Reconciliation

You get all the relevant documents consolidated on a single platform with the appropriate purchase. Additionally, the software automates the coding and categorization, simplifying the reconciliation process. In case of discrepancies, spotting errors becomes easy. Moreover, with features like locking the approved payments and restricted access for auditing, you can eliminate the chances of fraud or manipulation.

5. Accuracy

You improve the accuracy of your records and GRN matching with all the information streamlined on a single platform. Moreover, as the software relies on OCR, you eliminate the need for manual data entry, reducing the chances of errors. Also, you can integrate the automation software with your accounting platform and ERPs to sync data and ensure consistency across the platforms. 

6. Centralized Dashboard

You get a centralized dashboard with all the key information available in a unified place, acting as a single source of truth. Additionally, you get insights that can help in data-driven decision-making to facilitate procurement cost savings. Further, you can view all the awaiting payments and approvals on a dedicated dashboard. You no longer need to run from one platform to another for information as the software integrates with your accounting system.

7. Accessibility

The unavailability of a single person can create bottlenecks in the approval process and block the supply chain. With all the information streamlined on a single platform, each stakeholder can access relevant data for decision-making. So, whether the CEO is traveling or the CFO is not at the office, they can access the details from any corner of the world and avoid disruption in the supply chain.

8. Visibility

You get visibility for each step, each document, and each purchase. You can bring the entire procurement automation on a single platform and track the status in real time. Whether an employee raises a request, gets an invoice, or needs to clear payment, you will stay on top of the information without creating any delays or friction.

Automation is Easy With the Right Software

Adopting automation software isn’t easy, especially for critical processes like accounts payable, which also involve external stakeholders. The top three factors to look for in appropriate software are flexibility, visibility, and integration. 

Choose one that integrates with your existing processes and systems and is flexible enough to accommodate complex hierarchies. Instead of focusing solely on the accounting or procurement team, it should cater to all the key stakeholders and make automation easier to adopt. 

At Pluto, we aim to bring a balance among the spenders (employees), the savers (finance teams), and the sourcers (procurement teams). Each stakeholder gets visibility, and decision-makers get flexibility. Pluto integrates with your current system and enables you to automate accounts payable without affecting the supply chain. 

You can also automate your entire procurement process with Pluto and improve your bottom line. Read more in our procurement automation post.

What is Pluto Card?

At Pluto, we believe better expense management should be within everyone's reach. We solve MENA finance teams' pain points by replacing their business credit cards with Pluto corporate cards to help manage their expenses, saving them time and money.

How do we do that?

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Create Unlimited Corporate Cards

When multiple employees have access to one company credit card, it can be difficult for finance teams and business owners to track how much is being spent and where.

The result: everyone texting the CEO or CFO for OTPs during important meetings.

Pluto makes it easy to create and distribute virtual and physical corporate cards to each employee. Not only does this minimize fraud risk, but it also makes expense tracking simpler for finance teams, CFOs, and CEOs.

With Pluto’s unlimited corporate cards, you’ll be able to:

• Create virtual cards in seconds.
• Receive physical cards in 1-2 days.
• Use cards for vendor-specific cases.
• Assign every employee a budgeted corporate card.

Spend Control

Are you running ads at a cost that exceeds your marketing budget? Are you providing new hires with an allowance to cover the costs of their office equipment and software, or do you offer employees additional perks such as a monthly gym stipend?

Pluto gives you the ability to set limits and take control of your company’s business expenses, hassle-free.

With Pluto’s all-in-one expense management platform, you’ll be able to:

• Assign virtual or physical cards with spend limits.
• Allocate a specific budget towards daily, weekly, or monthly expenditures.
• Create a single-use purchase card that automatically deactivates once it is used.
• Control spending for different departments by allotting a budgeted amount to be spent.

Goodbye overspending 👋🏼

Reimburse In Record Time 

Reimbursements can be a painful process when the end of the month rolls in. Whether you’re scrambling to find lost receipts, trying to match receipts to their expenses, or organizing them in a document, there’s no easy way.

Drag & drop receipts

Pluto makes it easy for employees to list receipts.

Once a business expense is made by an employee, they’ll be able to drag & drop an image or screenshot of the receipt onto the Pluto dashboard.

Yes, as simple as that.

Easily reconcile receipts

Pluto allows you to seamlessly submit your receipts onto the platform. With Pluto, reconciliation is a breeze.

Once a business expense is made:

• Attach receipts to card transactions with just a few clicks.
• Transactions will automatically be categorized.

Add a memo to every transaction.

Get reimbursed in minutes

Waiting till the end of the month to get reimbursed for out-of-pocket business expenses is no longer necessary! 

Pluto gives you the opportunity to get reimbursed in minutes.

Once a reimbursable out-of-pocket expense is made, head to the Pluto dashboard to log the expense and get reimbursed as soon as it is approved.

Get Real-Time Data

Your month-end expense report comes in—and you find that you've spent more money than budgeted. Again.

With Pluto, you can stay on top of your expenses at any given moment.  

By getting real-time data, you can view reports of your company’s spending and ensure that your company’s finances are in check.  

It's simple, Pluto helps you avoid overspending and keep track of your company's finances in real-time.

So what does this mean for you?

• See transactions happening on your cards in real time.
• Receive notifications about every single card transaction, if needed.
• Collect information on which vendors your company is spending the most money with.
• Identify which employees or departments are spending the most.
• Get an overview of the expenses you have incurred daily or month-to-month.

Pluto allows you to adjust if spending has gone off course—and plop some celebratory balloons if it hasn't 🎊!

Integrate With Other Platforms

Every business has multiple platforms, and we know how important it is for them to talk to each other. Pluto's integrations make it easy to get started and ensure you have all the data you need in one place. 

Accounting Integration

Pluto syncs your company's transactional data to the most popular accounting platforms through direct integrations so you can automate your accounting and close books faster.

No more end-of-month mayhem! 😅 

Mobile Wallet Integration

With Pluto, you can add your virtual or physical cards to your digital wallet to make transactions seamless and easy.

We support Google Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay.

What Else Does Pluto Offer?

Pluto gives you the opportunity to scale your business, without having to worry about the smaller details.

No FX Fees

Pluto doesn't charge you any foreign transaction fees for using your Pluto corporate card outside of the UAE.

If your business is expanding rapidly and your team is traveling more frequently, you won't have to worry about those pesky charges eating into your profits.

Or if your company needs to pay for subscriptions, contractors, or freelancers in a different country, you can do so without racking up a bill in FX fees.

Remote teams, frequent flyers, or big spenders, we've got you covered!

Accepted Worldwide

Whether your team is distributed, travels a lot, or makes international payments, Pluto’s corporate cards are accepted worldwide.

Advanced Security & Privacy

Pluto is PCI DSS Compliant. We take the safety of your information very seriously; all your data is stored and processed following the highest data protection standards in the industry. 

Get Started in Minutes

Pluto's sign-up process takes minutes, not hours. By adopting a KYB and KYC process that can be done within a few clicks, you’ll be making transactions in no time.

• Simple application process.
• No credit history is required.
• Fast approvals.
• Instant card access once approved.

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Let us take the hassle out of managing your expenses. Start Using Pluto Today - For Free.