Sachin Sharma explains how to use corporate credit cards without losing expense control. The key: build approval around a purchase-requisition workflow where employees request spend, managers approve it, and the transaction gets flagged for card payment. This keeps visibility and accountability while capturing cash-back rewards like 1.5%.
So here's one thing you can do today to control expenses and still use your credit cards. So most companies or most owners think that if they're spending on credit cards, they can't use it in a cost control process. I'm going to bust that myth, right? And I'll kind of explain how you can do that. So if you have a credit card process, right? People have credit cards, they're spending and then you have a statement coming at the end of the month, you reconcile all those expenses with receipts. And the main issue with that is you are waiting for the end of the month to figure out where your employees are spending the money and you have no control over it. Right? So that's the cost control process. And that's the typical thing is, okay, I'm using my credit cards, like most of my spending is on credit card and, and you know, how can I control it? So the way to do this, and many of our customers are already doing this, is think about cost control as different from payments or how you pay your vendor. Cost control is understanding or having a process where somebody asks for making a purchase before they make a purchase and then you, they either go to a website to place the order, you might be issuing a purchase order, and then you pay using a credit card or whatever the case might be. So credit card is a payment method. Credit card is not cost control, right. So if, if you go in and let's say Brooks, you have employees and you know they want, they're requesting via email or whatever, or sometimes they're not. And then your credit card statement show up and you're saying, why didn't we spend on this? So think about next time is having a process where everybody has the ability to request the, what they're going to spend. It could be an estimated amount, doesn't have to be exact, but at least having the discipline. And that's again going back to spend management culture is having a process for people to kind of go in and say, I'm going to spend money on that. So you give accountability to people, maybe a manager is approving and so on. But guess what, now you have all the data, right, you know what your spend is going to be and now you have your credit card statement. It's just easy to match it. So for owners out there who kind of, or companies who like the cash back or you know, whatever, 1.5% or 150 basis point, you can still use credit cards, but just, you know, I would say integrated with your purchase requisition process. So that way you still create requisitions. You might have, like, a flag which says, yeah, I'm going to pay this using a credit card. So you can identify those transactions and still get the best of both worlds.
