Many business owners feel they are obliged to find the best expense management system for their business, regardless of their cost. Often, they don’t consider the full cost, including the rewards they may stay on the table.
Many of the same business owners maximize revenue on their personal credit cards, but they choose different avenues for the company, where their total spending may be greater.
Are expense management platforms such as ramps, ripple and Brexit suitable for your business? The devil is in the details.
What does a fee management platform provide?
Companies like ramp offer fee management and credit cards in one place. Ripple and Mexican Disengagement are examples of two platforms that offer a level of “reward” when you spend money on your credit card. Ripple is simpler and offers up to 1.75% cashback, while Brux provides businesses with its own points. When redeeming travel expenses, English rewards make a lot less profit than traditional corporate credit cards that receive the reward.
Ramps, ripple and Brexit value-added procedures are control over expenses, expenditure rules and issuance of cards. They offer a number of APIs that promise to connect your critical systems to their expense management software to simplify bookkeeping and expense management.
How much fee management do you need?
Many businesses set out to determine which expense management platform is correct, but I think it is the wrong question. First, the best question is: “Which type of expense management is best for your business?”
Many popular accounting platforms can automate import and check credit card fees. If you need to have a very strict or specific spending strategy, you may need a more integrated platform (such as ramps or ripple). Many company credit cards will allow you to set up early spending controls, but ripples of rules-based logic builds such as companies such as employees booking during peak trips, allowing higher airline fares.
Compressed numbers
Once you know the ideal level of expense management that makes sense, consider what you want to stay on the table. At the very least, you should expect to find a 2% cash reserve card that suits your business needs. This doesn’t seem like a big gap when you compare it to Rippling’s billboards with 1.75% cashback.
However, you should consider earning points and miles at a higher price. For example, when purchasing with Capital One Venture X Business, you can earn 10 miles on hotel and car rentals booked through Capital One Travel Portal. This is actually a 10% rebate, and these travel costs a lot if you have a lot of these rebates.
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Achieve the right balance
Some businesses absolutely need strict fee management, but in many cases they stay on the table by fully integrating and canceling valuable rewards that can be earned from popular corporate credit cards. Mixed strategies are usually a better option.
For example, in my business, we use an accounting system tailored to restaurants. The system automates many repetitive tasks and synchronizes invoices and fees from many of our major suppliers. The platform also allows us to easily sync our company credit cards.
The rewards we receive on these company cards are more than just payments for the next family vacation. They allow us to send employees on dream trips or make sure we don’t have to worry about expenses when we need to visit sick family members.
Bottom line
Before you determine if spending through the expense management platform really makes sense for your business, take a look at the full picture of the earnings.
If you have a lot of employees traveling and dining at the company for a dime, they will help. However, when you leave a considerable reward on your desk, it is difficult to justify having spending controls (such as shipping or advertising) in other categories.
