Author: Amy Fisher

The word “audit” can set many of us in a tailspin. It’s a heavy lift and can take up to weeks to complete and sift through financial records – especially if you don’t have the right tools in place. However, internal and external audits are a customary part of business operations and help to assess and verify the accuracy of your financial records – which means they’re here to stay.

Thankfully, Float has a solution that helps your auditing process run smoother than butter. 🧈 Our smart spend software and corporate cards give finance teams automated spend controls and quick access to audit trails for company spending. With better control and greater access to your financial records, audits are no longer something to dread. 👍🏼 Here’s why.

Get accurate information with real-time reporting 🕑

Audits are great for looking at historical snapshots of company spending, but wouldn’t it be great if you knew everything in real time? Float enables a real time overview of company spending so finance teams can ensure the books are always up to date with the right information. If your team is using Float cards for business purchases, then you’ll always know who is spending what as soon as a purchase is made. Float’s automatic SMS and Inbox receipt forwarding ensure that spenders submit their receipts on time, while automated receipt matching eliminates the need for manual expense reports and reconciliations. With Float there’s no waiting on employees to submit expense reports or tracking down receipts in the middle of an audit! 🧾

Set automated controls so everything runs smoothly 😌

Approval Policies ✅
Float allows finance managers to put financial controls in place to give teams the freedom to spend, while still having oversight and control on their end. This unique feature also offers proactive approvals for spend rather than reactive approvals. When you set up “Teams” in Float, you can ensure that approval requests are automatically sent to the right people every time an employee requests a corporate card or a spend increase. You can even set up multiple approval layers based on spend amounts and types.

Submission Policies 📩
Float also allows you to implement your company’s expense policies through our Submission Policies feature. Finance managers can set up submission policies for different expense categories and require employees to submit receipts and transaction details for purchases over a specific dollar amount or for all transactions. Float can also autopause cards for non-compliant transactions.

Seamlessly integrate with your existing accounting software👨‍💻

Float integrates directly into accounting software like QBO, Xero, and Netsuite to export transactions that are already coded and embedded with receipts for you. We also take the stress away through our Transaction Rules, which are designed to automatically code transactions from recurring merchants. So when an auditor is reviewing your books, you can rest easy knowing that all your transactions made on Float cards will have been exported with the correct GL codes, tax codes, and receipts too. ☑️

Stay organized and in-the-know with Audit Logs 🔎

Float offers Audit Logs for cards created on our platform and for spend requests and approvals too! 🤩 This allows finance teams to quickly access audit trails for specific time periods, ensuring their spend approval and card creation controls are being adhered to. The best part: Float provides a quick and easy way to submit documentation when it comes time for an audit. 💨 No loose paperwork or piles of receipts to gather. Our Audit Logs feature enables admins to export a history of creation, changes, pauses, expiration, and deletion for all their Float cards to date. You can also review a history of the creations, approvals, and declines of spend requests from your employees too.

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Every finance team needs a set of controls in place to ensure business spending meets company policies – and that their financial records are as accurate as can be.👌🏼 Float’s smart spend software and corporate cards empower finance teams to easily automate their financial controls and have clear oversight of their corporate spending all year long. Finance teams can also use our real-time reporting tools and conveniently review records of audit trails for Float cards and spend requests so they’re fully prepared for an audit.

Ready to get started with Float? Book a demo or connect with us today and we’d be happy to show you all of the incredible features we have for you.

Every business in any industry knows the struggle of creating and managing expense reports – whether it’s for travel, marketing, or even simple daily business purchases. This dreaded process is far too tedious and difficult to keep track of, especially if your team is rapidly growing.

At Float, we consider this the old way of doing things. It goes a little something like this. ⬇️

💳 An employee makes a purchase
👨‍💻 Employee fills out an excel spreadsheet
🧾 Employee scans and emails their receipts (if they still have them)
⏳ Employee waits to be reimbursed

But now, we’re introducing a new way: The Float way 🤩

With Float, you can wave goodbye to submitting expense reports altogether. Our software makes it quick and easy for employees to record transaction details of business purchases in real time. We’ve eliminated all the paperwork, long waits for reimbursements, and the back and forth required between employees and the finance team. You’re welcome in advance! 🎉

Along with our software, Float’s smart corporate cards give employees the option to submit their receipts easily and effortlessly! 👍🏼 No spreadsheets to manage and no reports to file! 

Every time an employee makes a purchase on their Float card, they’ll be automatically prompted to submit a receipt – that’s it! 💪🏼 There’s no need to log into Float or download another app. Once your receipt is submitted, we’ll automatically match it to the transaction on your card and voila! 🤌🏼

Float allows spenders to submit their receipts in three simple ways:

1. Upload receipt via Float’s quick link 📤

After making a purchase on a Float card, we’ll text or email spenders a custom quick link to upload their receipt. From this link, they may also be asked to provide purchase details like expense categories and a description – depending on the company’s specific expense policies.

2. Text a photo of the receipt 🤳

Spenders can simply respond to Float’s SMS transaction confirmation with a photo of their receipt! To set this up, they must add their mobile number to their Float profile on the “Settings” page. Notifications must also have been enabled for the company by an admin.  

3. Forward your email receipt 📨

All receipts delivered to the spender’s inbox can be forwarded directly to Float by using a personalized receipt forwarding address. Companies can also set up Float’s auto-forwarding feature to automatically send receipts from subscriptions or advertising platforms that get delivered via email. Check out this Float article for instructions on how to find your personalized receipt forwarding address and set up the auto-forwarding function.

Float matches receipts to transactions so you don’t have to 🧾

Once your receipt is submitted, we’ll automatically match it to the transaction for you. There’s no need to log into Float or for the Finance team to manually reconcile hundreds of transactions at month-end.

While we always recommend sending in your receipt as soon as a transaction is made, Float is able to automatically match receipts to transactions even if they’re submitted weeks after a purchase is made. Spenders and managers can also log into Float at their own convenience to view their Receipts Inbox and match receipts to transactions manually. And, if there happens to be a receipt that we can’t match to a transaction, you can easily view them in the “Not Matched” tab. 

It’s time to wave goodbye to expense reports and submit your receipts effortlessly with Float. 👋🏼 

Ready to scale your business and ditch the growing pains? Axe your overly complex approval processes and make company spending easier with Float’s Team Management feature.

We saw the need for an efficient feature that helped startups and SMEs decentralize the expense management process, distribute responsibility across teams and give employees greater autonomy to spend. At the same time, we also know how critical it is for finance teams to maintain oversight or control over corporate spending. So, we created Team Management to tackle it all! 👊🏼

Team Management — a feature available through our Professional Plan — enables users to set up “teams” within the platform that are structured to align with their approval policies. It helps you formalize your spend approval structure and fully automates the approval process by team, spend type and amount. You can easily set up teams in Float based on departments such as Marketing, Sales and IT, or by geographic location. For instance, this is helpful if you have a Toronto-based office and a Vancouver-based office, or multiple office addresses in one city.

How to set up teams within Float 👩🏽‍💻
1. Start by determining how you want to track and approve expenses based on your approval policies. For example, if every department manager is responsible for approving employee expenses, create your teams based on department.
2. Identify who in your organization will be assigned as a “Manager” in Float. Add them as a user and assign them the “Manager” role.
3. Continue to add other team members as “Spenders.”
4. Create a team whose expenses are routed directly to the assigned “Manager.”

Each team can have a number of managers or members attached to it. Managers also have full visibility into the spending of the team and can participate in the approval process too. On the other hand, spenders only see their own transactions but always follow the approval process that is assigned to their team.

Creating your own multi-level approval structure 💸
Once your team is added into Float, you can create a designated approval policy that’s specific to a team or your company as a whole.

Using our platform, you can set up approval policies to mimic your company’s existing expense policies and set automated approval flows by spend amount or spend type. You can also create multiple levels of approval for higher spend amounts, one-time purchase or recurring expenses. For example, you can permit a Marketing Manager to approve all expenses under $2,000 and for anything over that amount, you can create a second level of approval that goes through the Finance department. ✅

This feature gives managers more visibility over team spending with the power to set predefined budgets, distribute corporate cards and approve spend requests in seconds! Employees can also log into Float and easily submit spend requests from managers, who can be notified via Slack, email or text. Once approved, virtual cards can be instantly set up and employees can request top-ups if needed. 💳

It’s a win-win for everyone 🤩
Float allows for faster, smarter and more efficient spending all around! 🙏🏽 The ability to set up teams and multi-level approvals provides long-term value for the entire company:

Greater accuracy and control 👍🏼
Managers have a better view of where money is going, how it’s being spent and who is spending it, while the finance team still has control over corporate spending.

Adds speed and efficiency 🚀
A seamless spend approval process means easier and quicker expense management and happier employees who can make transactions in a flash.

Promotes a decentralized structure 💳
Managers gain greater authority to track and oversee team spending, while employees have the flexibility to make business purchases on demand without a lengthy chain of approvals.

Ready to give Float a try? Get started with us today!

Is month-end craziness bogging you down? Float offers a powerful two-way integration with QBO to make spend management a breeze!

Our QBO integration feature packs a punch, offering a range of benefits to make managing your finances easy as 🥧. You can look forward to 

✍🏽Improved transaction categorization 

✅ Better receipt management 

⏱ Time saved with less manual data entry

We designed this feature to sync seamlessly into your daily workflow. Our goal was to optimize the month-end process for your finance team so they could finally say goodbye to low-value tasks and guesswork. Our QBO integration feature makes it so that you no longer have to re-add and retype data with the reassurance of greater accuracy in your books – not just at month-end but on a daily basis! 🚀 

With Float’s QBO integration, you manage all card-linked transactions in Float, and then directly export into Quickbooks, with transactions automatically coded and reconciled for you. Once you try it, you’ll wonder how you lived without it!

See it for yourself in this quick product tour.

Currently using Quickbooks to manage your corporate finances? Here’s how Float levels up  your experience and your books:

3 ways to automate spend management using our QBO feature 🙌🏻

👩🏽‍💻  Auto-apply category transaction settings and pre-code cards by GL, Vendor, Tax or Tag

✅  Set up merchant-based rules to enable auto-categorization by merchant or vendor 

💳  Bulk update hundreds of transactions for purchases that have similar accounting settings

QBO manages your receipts better – with tax included 🧾

Float allows every employee to submit receipts via email, text or direct upload into the platform. Once a receipt enters the system, Float uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to pull the tax and tip off a receipt for easy and simple tracking. We know that some Canadian provinces have unique tax rules, and so we created this feature to accommodate multi-part tax codes and auto-recognize them every time a receipt is exported. 👍🏼

We know that so many SMEs and startups are using Quickbooks. That’s why our main goal is to easily integrate into every part of your work day so that managing your finances is a responsibility that’s easy, shared and simple to track. 

To learn more about Float’s QBO integration feature, book a demo with us today!