Partner Article

Guide to 2014: Expense management, corporate cards, payment technologies

With a new year, come new trends and advancements, making for better business management and overall productivity, writes John Sharman, CEO of Tuxedo.

2014’s developments will be an evolution of 2013 and businesses should expect to see real movement towards alternative payment methods, in particular where expense management is concerned.

For numerous businesses, expenses account for a vast proportion of overall expenditure – between 8% and 12%, which in turn is forcing them to look closely at more cost effective and time-efficient solutions for expense management.

The biggest challenges we’re seeing in the world of expense management are the impact of credit card surcharges, fraudulent claims, unfair expense burdens on employees and reconciliation/ auditing and then ultimately, the impact on business profit margins as a whole.

The coming year will therefore see more and more businesses focusing on cost effective alternatives to corporate credit cards and expense approval and reimbursement. As such, we will see an increase in the use of prepaid corporate expense solutions, allowing for total control over expenditure, with the ability to view employee transactions, allocate funds by department and individual, employees only spending the amount on the card, and the facility to pull unused funds back off the cards into the controlling account.

Indeed, the demand for prepaid cards is increasing – with global prepaid card transaction volumes having grown by more than 20% during the past four years and expected to reach 16.9 billion in 2014.

It will be SMEs in particular that will be turning to card solutions and here at Tuxedo, we offer the flexibility of a platform called the eccount®, through which innovative payment solutions are managed.

The benefits to SMEs are significant as it aids in reducing the requirement for expense forms and receipt reconciliation, allows for instant money transfer to employee cards and has the functional ability to sweep unspent money from the cards back to the eccount and then finally, provides full HMRC approved transactional statements at individual card levels.

For larger companies, where there are multiple departments, the requirement for tracking expenses is an even greater task and opens them up to more abuse and administration tasks. With all this in mind, there will be a greater need for central expense management systems in these larger corporations – with companies being time-poor and wanting to maximise on profitability and cut back on administration.

For such businesses, Tuxedo offers an enterprise eccount whereby companies with more complex expense set-ups can take advantage of the platform, as all departmental eccounts can be centrally controlled and delegated to specific administrators – providing the ability to manage large volumes of cards from one holding account.

To conclude, in an environment where cost control and operating efficiency continue to be a focus for many organisations, a review of their expense management solution could provide a simple, low cost but highly effective solution.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tuxedo Money Solutions .