Why You Should Be Using Virtual Card for Expenses of Your Business

By Suhani Jain
June 11, 2020
3 min read

For many businesses, the process of expense filing and reimbursements can be a nightmare. While employees & finance teams lose out on precious time keeping a tab of receipts, businesses lose out approximately $34.92 on every claim that’s manually processed. Using a virtual card for expenses can be of great help with avoiding this.

Expense management is a cakewalk with Open’s corporate cards. For all digital expenses your teammates may have, you can assign them virtual cards. Just set limits & load them directly from your Open account. Expense cards can be assigned to teammates who step out of the office & need to make card swipes. With every swipe, your employees get a WhatsApp ping to upload their receipts & the expense is filed just like that.

Virtual cards, on the other hand, are useful for streamlining digital expenses such as SaaS subscriptions and advertising spends. Let’s take a more in-depth look at them.

What is a virtual card?

Let’s get down to the basics. A virtual card is a unique 16-digit number that functions just like a physical credit card & none of its complexities. You can use this number just as you would use a regular credit card, with many added advantages that make it optimal for SaaS expense management.

Using virtual cards for expenses is the best way to simplify the digital spends of your business. You can load the cards and assign them to your teammates in minutes, ready to be used—no more wasting time on shipping or activating the card.

The best part? There’s no maintenance fee whatsoever on your virtual card, it can never be lost, and you can activate/ deactivate it with a single click.

How using a virtual card for expenses can help you?

Say you head the marketing team at your firm. I’m sure month ends are a tedious time for you, when you are swamped with receipts to match your teammate’s reimbursements. The scenario of managing digital expenses is pretty broken right now. Allow me to paint a picture for you.

You’re getting late for a very important call & suddenly you get a ping from one of your teammates reminding you to pay off those multiple SaaS subscriptions. You think you’ll get to it later, but as we all know, life gets in the way. Or, well, some other important work. 🤷‍♀️

Now, as a quick fix, you share the credit card details with your teammates – hoping that it will smoothen the process of paying for digital ads, subscription renewals, travel bookings, etc. Sadly it solves nothing because now everyone is running behind you for that very precious OTP.

Enter virtual cards.

With virtual cards, you can assign multiple cards to your teammates & set dynamic spend limits. So everyone’s on their own, acing their work & not held back for that one credit card detail.

If the marketing team needs to pay off expenses for running digital ads, blog hosting, content management system etc., go ahead & assign them multiple cards for each activity for better categorisation of expenses. Same goes for every other team at your firm – Tech teams need 5 different cards – Done! ✅

Now, that won’t ever be possible with physical cards, would it?

Virtual cards are the smartest for a reason!

You can get greater visibility on your team’s spend, track who is spending on what & your teammates can pay for subscriptions & renewals with ease.

What’s more, you ask?

You also have unprecedented flexibility with virtual cards – you can add or cancel a card as the need arises, with just a click. There’s no waiting time there too.

Virtual cards for the win

It’s no secret that virtual cards are the future of expense management.

We at Open are thrilled to be the forerunners in driving this change. To get your hands on the virtual cards, hit on this link and own the smartest cards for your business.

Until then, try our physical cards – also known as expense cards & explore other exciting features on Open–right from bulk payouts to automated accounting & everything in between.