The advantages of doing expenses with an Expend card vs a Company card

We are often asked about the advantages of doing business expenses with a smart Expend card over a standard company card. This is no surprise to us given the smart, savvy nature of our customers - who are always looking for the best way to support their busy and growing companies.

We are asked this very question a LOT. Here are our top 5 reasons:

1. Expend records your expenses instantaneously.

2. Expend allows you to set spending policies across employee cards.

3. Expend makes compliance a logistical nightmare of the past.

4. Expend makes employees' expenses instantly visible to management

5. Our accounting software integrations

1. Expend records your expenses instantaneously.

If you use American Express or another credit card you may not have a prompt to capture your expense right away. This means you’ll have to wait for it to appear on your statement (which can take anywhere from one to four days!) and then manually complete the expense information from that transaction, often using lengthy spreadsheets.

Not only do you have to remember to keep your receipt, find the transaction associated with your purchase and upload any necessary information about the transaction, but it takes exponentially more time doing the same process across numerous transactions at the end of the month. Not to mention, the information you record may not be as accurate given the time since making it. 

With Expend, expenses management is baked into every part of our system, so you can avoid those steps as you receive a prompt immediately with all of the important transaction information included. All you have to do is snap a photo and the expense is registered.

2. Expend allows you to set spending policies across employee cards.

Corporate cards generally have very high limits - the first card I was ever given had a starter balance of £5,000. That's a very large amount of money to walk around with and not be controlled.

In any company, you’ll get impulsive spenders who don’t think about what it means to have £5,000 worth of credit. Without control, if anything is spent on the corporate card that is not deemed an expense, you have to retroactively make reprimands which isn’t a good situation for anyone.

With our Expend Flex card we offer business owners and finance teams full control and oversight through our online dashboard. Providing advanced features that allow for the effortless ability to set and amend budgets by day, week, and month as well as across categories. This guards against potential overspend and fraud, allowing for both peace of mind and a hands-off approach after the initial setup.

Plus, with our advanced security features, you can now easily lock the card entirely or switch off different ways to pay with each card. These include: the magnetic stripe, chip and pin, online or contactless.  Plus for online purchases, our cards use 3D Secure for extra peace of mind. 

3. Expend makes compliance a logistical nightmare of the past.

With corporate cards, you have to pass compliance checks for every employee using one. You can’t just go to the bank and get as many cards as you need straight away.

Expend has streamlined the compliance process so that once your business is verified (no credit checks required), obtaining employee expense cards is far easier and quicker.

4. Expend makes employees' expenses instantly visible to Admins.

This is key for managing a team’s expenses, whether it’s across 5 or 500+ people. Going back to this issue of control, some managers want to know immediately when an employee spends money, and giving them this instant feedback is something Expend can do and something corporate cards often cannot.

That’s why we designed Expend for the modern businessperson, who faces the dynamic challenges of modern management, and our knowledge of how teams function and work together on a daily basis.

6. Providing more than just a corporate credit card alternative 

As our product has grown and matured, Expend offers tools to manage every and all type of expense beyond our own payment card.

There will be times that you will want to use the company credit card, PayPal, Direct Debit etc. to pay for expenses.

The great news is that you can use Expend to report these expenses too. Expend provides the tools for businesses to scan their receipts and invoices to extract the important data fast and sync with the payment method used. You can use your business Visa debit or credit cards separately from Expend cards to manage expenses. When a card is connected (via our Card Connect feature) all transactions are captured, and expenses can be raised from the transaction details.

Everything is tracked, checked, and approved within the same slick workflow. Reducing the need to pay for multiple tools, manage non-Expend card users, and much more. 

7. Our accounting software integrations

Last but not least, we are particularly proud of our integrations, as we have put a huge amount of development work into making it the best it can be and we are constantly improving them. Currently, we offer real-time click-free integrations with Xero and QuickBooks (the first smart payment card provider on their UK marketplace) and support other major platforms with tailored CSV downloads.

So, there you have it, our top 5 reasons for how Expend can provide a more versatile expenses management solution than just using corporate cards. Corporate cards are designed as a separate banking product and while they have been historically popular - with good reason - they are often not the most practical or optimised solution for the dynamic nature of modern teams and the shift towards technology and decentralisation.