Virtual cards offer added safety, reduced costs, reduced waste, boosted cash back, unprecedented spend visibility, and instant reconciliation. That’s why we partnered with Ramp to bring our customers all of these benefits and more.
In order to explain why virtual cards are such a boon for business expenses, it’s important to first understand what a virtual card actually is. A virtual card is similar to a credit card in that it has numbers, a date, and all of the information you’d normally use when inputting your card information for an online purchase. However, unlike a regular debit or credit card, you don’t keep using the same virtual card for years until it expires.
Instead, a virtual card is like a disposable credit card that’s linked to your actual credit or debit card. A virtual card may be good only for a single purchase, a set duration, or up to a certain spend limit. After that, it’s done. You just get a new one. Why would you want an endless stream of card numbers for your business? Well, there are actually a lot of reasons, especially if you’re still using paper checks or paper invoices. Some of the most important reasons to use a virtual card for your B2B spend include:
Safety
Think about this—you don’t carry around the originals of your most important documents, do you? Like your social, birth certificate, or marriage license? Usually, we just give someone a copy. A disposable version that won’t really impact our lives if it’s lost.
Virtual cards are kind of like that from a safety perspective. Avoid having your personal information stolen as well as interruptions that are likely to occur if you have to report fraudulent activity on your account and wait for a new card. Hackers and fraudsters alike are stopped in their tracks with a virtual card, though. And if you suspect suspicious activity while the card is still active, no big deal. Just cancel it and grab a new card number, leaving all your actual accounts in tact and safely away from the outside world.
Even outside of privacy invasions and malicious actors on the web, internal fraud also has no room to grow. Because spend can be set for a specific limit and purchases are visible in real-time, there’s not much room for internal fraud to take hold. Consider it damage mitigation and risk prevention.
Obligatory COVID-19 tie-in:
It’s 2020. We’d be crazy not to mention how (or if) virtual cards can help during the pandemic as business processes are completely upended in the name of social distancing. While some analog businesses are stuck dealing in papers and in-person contact, businesses that use virtual cards can manage their jobs quicker, safer, and from the security of home minus all the security risks. Virtual cards are one way to boost business continuity during the coronavirus.
Reduce Costs (And Save The Trees)
Money is expensive, am I right? Not only is it costly to have people working to collect paper invoices, print paper checks, reconcile spend, and on and on and on, the simple materials cost alone is staggering.
“Paper checks account for $12.5 trillion of business spend every year in the US alone.” –Tracy Kellaher
I don’t even want to contemplate what that means for the environment, especially if you start looking at envelopes too.
Make two strategic strides at once by reducing paper waste and excess spend with the switch to virtual cards.
Cash Back
Sure, some banks offer a little cash back on purchases, but what if you could get rewarded in ways befitting to a business? Not only do you get the added benefits of ditching the expense reports and the paper piles in favor of automated accounting, you could earn 1.5% cashback and possibly even more in rebates just for spending in the same ways you already do.
Plus, you can maximize that cashback by utilizing dozens of cards across the company, because it will no longer be such a risk to equip your employees with a little company plastic. Cha-ching!
Spend Visibility
Spend visibility is basically a buzzword now. It’s something you need in order to accurately track your finances and make wise choices about your suppliers. Through the use of virtual cards, you become equipped with basically instant full spend visibility for every analog method you replace. Easily view the 50k foot overview or a granular, single-user, single-purchase snippet of data, all updated in real-time. No more waiting.
This offers a major boost to spend forecasting that can now be easily viewed filtered by category—e.g. department, merchant, or employee. You can search, get customized alerts, and even find automated savings.
Instant Reconciliation
Tired of chasing people down? Equally tired of waiting and waiting only to spend a bunch of time reconciling invoices? If you’re doing it the analog way, then that’s good—it means your brain already knows there’s an easier way.
With virtual cards, you can experience the efficiency of instant reconciliation. Automatic categorization and receipt-matching plus accounting integrations let the old expense report take care of itself. With cards from Ramp, modern finance teams can save 5.4 days and $15k per month. And the really cool thing about that is…
Premikati has partnered up with Ramp to provide unlimited virtual and physical cards to make managing your spend a breeze. Earn cashback, access more than $150k in partner rewards, easy accounting integrations and no fees. Plus, Ramp boasts 10-20x the limits of traditional credit lenders thanks to their novel underwriting system and a 30 day payment schedule with no interest. We’re excited to join together to help you find strategic savings from the best suppliers, safety, spend visibility, and a big win for the environment.