You’ve got a lot on your plate. You’re running a business, managing a team, spending way too much time on expense reports every month—it’s a lot easier to hand the corporate card to somebody else than it is to stop what you’re doing and make every transaction yourself.
You’ve thought about getting a few of your employees their own corporate credit card, but is it really worth the hassle when the use isn’t consistent? And who’s to say that having several corporate credit cards isn’t dramatically increasing your chances of experiencing loss, theft, and expense report fraud? Who’s idea was that, anyway?
The other option is to have your employees float business costs they incur on their personal cards. But this leaves your employees stressed, waiting for reimbursements. Plus, the company has absolutely no visibility into how company money is being spent until the expense reports come piling in at the end of the month.
We get it. Card sharing seems easier and more convenient. But at what cost? Here are the top three dangers of a shared credit card and what you can do to avoid the risks.
1. Theft and loss
Theft and loss are the most obvious dangers of card sharing. How well do you know the people that you’re handing your card to? Are they the type of person to lose their ID when they go out, lock their keys in their car on a weekly basis, or forget their wallet at the checkout counter?
The chances of losing your corporate credit card increase with every person you hand it to and every person they hand it to after that. If your employees are passing around your credit card because you can’t be bothered with every purchase, then it’s only a matter of time before that valuable little piece of plastic goes missing.
In the best case scenario, your credit card will disappear, never to be used again. In the worst case scenario, the card will fall into the wrong hands and your account will be drained of its funds before you can even remember who you lent it to last.
2. Unexpected costs
There are always unexpected costs when handing out your corporate credit card to various employees. The software wasn’t on sale like she thought, but she bought it anyway. He added an extra box of donuts at half the price. He accidentally bought two instead of one, but you’ll use the extra one eventually.
Unexpected costs pile high when multiple people are making purchases, especially if there’s a misunderstanding or two along the way. Have you ever told an employee one thing, but they heard something entirely different? Of course, you have; it happens all the time. Don’t let it happen with your business costs.
3. Messy finances
Every good business owner knows that operating on a strict budget is essential to a profitable company. Unfortunately, regardless of how well you plan your monthly budget, card sharing makes business expenses a lot more difficult to monitor and restrict.
Unexpected costs arise, there are misunderstandings in what should or shouldn’t have been purchased, and memory fails. You wouldn’t have approved one purchase if you hadn’t forgotten about another unexpected expense that arose the week before. A couple employees forgot to turn in expense reports, and you thought you had more in the bank than you actually did.
Card sharing is messy and when your finances are messy, your company suffers.
The solution: BILL Spend & Expense
BILL Spend & Expense is a spend-management tool outfitted with a variety of time-saving, expense-tracking, cost-cutting features designed to make your life easier. We’ve combined the software with our own BILL Divvy Card powered by Visa* to create a much smarter way for your company to spend.
With BILL you can:
- Get a company corporate card for everyone in the company
- Control each employee’s access to company money in real-time
- See transactions as they happen, instead of waiting until the end of the month
- Eliminate the need for manual expense reports completely
- Create spending groups to track expenses across departments, teams, projects, etc.
- See how your company is tracking against spend goals
- Freeze or delete cards at any time
- Create and use virtual cards for extra security
- Send or request funds (and funds will be available immediately on your BILL Divvy Card)
- Score amazing travel deals through BILL Travel
BILL offers a simple solution to your card sharing problem, plus so much more. And best of all, we do it all for free. That’s right. Free.
*The BILL Divvy Card is issued by Cross River Bank, member FDIC, and is not a deposit product.