When operating a B2B company, whether operating as a global entity or an SME, it’s important to find ways to reduce unnecessary expenses while mitigating risks and keeping your business operational.

Despite its challenge, keeping track of a company's payables can greatly reduce unnecessary expenses if done properly. Far too often companies run the risk of losing money via the incomplete reporting of expenses, lack of transaction visibility, and transactional costs of cross-border banking. CFOs, who are responsible for the business's financial standing and wellbeing, are beginning to make the shift towards virtual cards to better protect their business and help save money.

Virtual cards are best described as a financial instrument that can be used to pay securely online anywhere where card payments are accepted, helping to bypass the traditional financial hurdles of wire transfer fees, long transfer times and even send money to non-SEPA territories. A virtual card can be used by a business or its employees. They work as physical cards meaning each card has a unique 16-digit number, expiry date and a CVV, so you can pay online in a secure way.

When a business makes use of Corporate Virtual Cards, it helps to improve cash flow, reduce transactional costs, and provide better transaction visibility and control when compared to bank transfers.

Here are four ways how to cut costs and manage spending with virtual cards: 

Easily Track Expenses

Running a business requires exceptional organizational skills. Between personal employee expenses, department expenses, taxes and expenses from paying suppliers and other important members of your business, keeping track can become a daunting and time-consuming task. It only takes one simple miscalculation or unexpected cost to throw the books into disarray. Without a proper system of tracking expenses and reducing the unexpected, the business is more likely to fail over time.

Using corporate virtual cards can help your business easily track expenses, allowing your CFO and financial team to focus on more important activities. Your business can set up a multi-currency IBAN account, or sub account with a dedicated IBAN, deposit funds into it, then issue unlimited single or multi-use spending cards for a transaction. This way, there’s a finite spending amount allowed, this minimizing the risk of going over budget. Since these cards are used for specific tasks, the expenses can easily be tracked by project or employee, ensuring that every penny is accounted for and expense sheets remain balanced.

Manage Spending And Online Subscriptions

Since virtual cards are designed to be single or multi-use cards, the expenses placed on the cards can easily be controlled. For example, a single-use virtual card can only be used once. In a multi-use card, limits can be placed with just a few clicks which can restrict the amount that is allowed to be spent or the number of times it can be used. You can also restrict virtual cards by the merchant, merchant category, time of day, or value.

Having total control over company spending using virtual cards can give your CFOs peace of mind knowing that there is an added layer of protection keeping your business within the set financial plan.

Virtual cards make it easy to also manage online subscriptions. Managing an ever-growing list of subscriptions can be a difficult task to accomplish without a reliable system to keep track of monthly payments. Additional costs can be accrued due to surprise charges or late payment fees, hence virtual cards can ensure that payments are made on time so that important subscriptions aren't cut off due to insufficient funds.

Simplify Reconsolidation

With numerous internal company expenses and endless subscriptions to keep track of, closing the books at the end of the month can be a tedious task that not even the best CFO wants to handle. Multiple physical company cards can make it difficult to bring all the company expenses together under one file so that they can be arranged appropriately.

Having debit virtual cards will enable your business to close the books faster since everything is connected to one account. Furthermore, metadata could be added to each virtual card which could be used to quickly identify and reconcile a transaction. For example, this could include a booking reference or a campaign ID.

Reduce Transactional Costs

Time is money, and there are alternatives to waiting on SEPA payments or wire transfers. Whether you’re paying fees to send money, or dealing with a delay in funds getting cleared to move from one account to another, it’s not an efficient application of your hard-earned money. Nor is keeping suppliers waiting on your payments to clear.

Virtual cards mitigate the time and cost, by functioning as a traditional, physical credit card would. Instantaneous payments, but rather than a swipe or tap, it’s the click of a button.

For those who are looking to gain better control over corporate online spending, Fyorin corporate virtual cards, powered by MasterCard, will help to achieve that. Fyorin cards can be used anywhere online cards payments are accepted and multi-currency cards could be created which will earn you cash back on every spend.

Fyorin is on a mission to accelerate growth for their clients by removing the complexity out of business banking. They offer a payments and financial operations platform that enables businesses to automate and monetize their flow of funds. With its simplified solution and top-notch customer service, Fyorin helps businesses to scale without the need to grow their payment operations team since their solution removes 90 per cent of the manual work around payment operations.

Some of the services it offers from one platform are; Dedicated multi-currency IBANs, sub-accounts, multi-payment rails capabilities (SEPA, SWIFT and ACH), Automated payables with your preferred accounting solution and Virtual Cards.