Category: Expense Management

We often hear a lot about how companies are actively promoting a positive corporate culture within their organizations. It builds trust with employees, boosts engagement and ultimately creates a workplace people want to be in. But there’s another side to this coin that’s worth looking into. What are companies doing to promote a healthy spending culture in their organizations? 🤔 After all, taking care of your company’s financial health is really what makes everything else possible.

First, what is a spending culture and why does it matter? 🤷🏾‍♂️

A company spending culture is the infrastructure of processes, policies, systems and values that govern how, when and why an organization spends, manages and saves money. This infrastructure is essential as it lays the foundation for the success of any organization. Why? Well, it determines their financial stability, longevity and ability to invest in the right people, drive innovation and increase revenue for growth and expansion. ✅

It’s a way of being. 😎

A healthy spending culture needs to be embodied and promoted by management so they can lead by example and educate employees on why it’s important and how it relates to everything they do. When every employee operates with these values in mind, it will have a compounding effect by normalizing smart spending decisions company wide.

It’s a team effort. 👫👫

To be successful, this requires effective communication and collaboration across all departments to ensure the entire company is aligned on spending expectations. If one department falls short, it can have a domino effect (and not in a good way). 🎲

It’s a non-negotiable. 🙅🏻‍♂️

If growth is on your priority list, keep reading.🧐 How you manage and spend capital can literally make or break you if it goes unchecked over time. That’s why it’s important to have the infrastructure in place to give you clear financial oversight at all times. 

Healthy spending culture vs. unhealthy spending culture

Healthy Spending Culture 👍🏼	Unhealthy Spending Culture 👎🏼
✅ Robust financial policies in place to govern company spending	🚫 Teams are not aligned with corporate spending goals due to lack of communication and no policies in place
✅ Foolproof processes that use automation software to monitor, track and manage daily spending and expenses	🚫 Manual and tedious expense processes that waste time due to errors and delays
✅ Finance teams can easily approve spend requests for employees and promptly collect receipts	🚫 Employees can lose a sense of responsibility for work because they’re relying on approvals from someone in another department
✅ Leaders can set spending limits that align with departmental budgets for various employees and teams	🚫 Leaders have little to no control or visibility of corporate spending
✅ Employees are empowered to make spending decisions mindfully, responsibly and quickly so that they can progress in their projects	🚫 Employees choose to make impulse decisions without approval to spend simply because they want to move forward with projects

When you have the system, everything falls into place. Float has the system.

We weren’t going to tell you all of the amazing things that come with a healthy spending culture, without a REAL solution. 😆 Cause we sure have one for you! Float’s automation software and corporate cards are designed to bring every organization into their financial prime.

Our automation spend software serves as a core component of the infrastructure needed to achieve a healthy spending culture. Why? It empowers startups to establish financial policies, simplify complex processes and garner more visibility into company spending so they can keep a pulse on their finances at all times. Leaders can set category spend controls, maintain project budgets and drive operational efficiency in their financial departments, with full insight into financials and reporting in real time. 

They can authorize transaction and category spending in advance, giving employees greater freedom to act on innovative ideas and make critical purchase decisions faster. Not to mention, they can have a closer eye on where their money is going, who’s spending it and what it’s being spent on. 💰👀 This creates a workplace where employees feel empowered to take action, make valuable decisions and have a hand in driving the company toward growth. Bonus: startups in particular can motivate their employees to view corporate spending as a team effort that should be done mindfully, honestly and strategically. 👍🏽

At Float, a big part of our mission is promoting a healthier spending culture by simplifying the way your team spends, tracks and manages your money. Backed by automation software, our corporate cards are approved in one day and delivered to you within three! No long wait times. No complicated processes. No headaches.

If improving the spend culture in your company is top of mind, connect with us today to learn more about how we can help!

Companies in nearly every industry have fallen prey to the manual, time-consuming tasks that come with finance and expense management. From chasing receipts and tracking expenses to endless hours of reporting, these archaic processes have been causing headaches and delays for far too long. But don’t worry, you can automate that! When we add automation to the equation, companies not only eliminate this grunt work, but their finance teams gain greater visibility and control into corporate spending (in real time). 

If you’re a company looking to streamline your financial processes, automated spend management software will flip your biggest pain points right on the head. It successfully optimizes these processes by allowing finance teams to easily acquire corporate cards (physical and virtual), set category spend controls, track purchases in real time, record receipts and more. It cuts the guesswork, saves time and removes the frustration of managing company financials. 

Don’t wait, automate! 💨

The drawbacks of manual expense management are all too clear. So, let’s talk about the advantages and how automation boosts productivity and helps companies and startups perform at full speed. 

⭐ Say goodbye to human error

Receipts get lost, expense reports are incomplete, submissions are past due and the list goes on. 😴 According to the Global Business Travel Association, 19% of expense reports come back with errors and take approximately 20 minutes to fix. If time is money, this can’t be good. 🤷🏾‍♂️ When companies automate their financial processes, they can ensure 100% attention to detail without lifting a finger. 

⭐ Happier, more productive employees

If a startup has yet to introduce corporate cards, an employee might find themselves having to use their personal credit card to make business-related purchases and wait to be reimbursed. 🕰 If every employee has access to a corporate card that’s integrated into your automated expense software, companies can empower employees to make valuable spending decisions, reduce back and forth on requests and approvals, and eliminate the stress of having to use their own credit cards. 🎉  Financial controllers are able to set clear spending limits with category controls, and employees don’t have to worry about keeping track of their own purchases since everything is recorded instantly. It’s a win-win for everyone. 

⭐️ Lower risk of expense fraud 

Many fraud incidents are often associated with padded travel and expense claims 🙅🏻‍♂️ With automated expense software, financial controllers can instantly prompt employees to submit receipts after a purchase is made and automatically match the purchase with the receipt. This is an actionable way to prevent false or inflated claims by tracking expenses in real time and holding employees accountable through notifications. It also gives startups a better look into purchase and reimbursement history so they can detect duplicate expense reports. ✅

When businesses automate their financial and expense management processes, they can unlock the full potential of their finance teams. They are able to drive operational efficiency and accuracy and gain a full picture into corporate spending at any given time. 

At Float, we support companies by giving them a simplified solution to optimize the way they spend, track and manage their money. Our corporate cards and spend management software are one step businesses can take to improve their financial processes, give employees greater access to capital and fast track onto the expressway of growth! 🏎

Want to learn more about how Float can help you take advantage of expense management automation? Connect with us today!

Let’s look at some facts:

• Digital marketing spend is increasing and is going to reach US $640B by 2027, growing at CAGR of 10.3%
• During COVID digital marketing is the main lead generation channel (source)

This means that the companies must get better at tracking the impact of their marketing spend and empowering their marketing teams with the right tools/workflows. So what are the problems marketing teams are facing today?

Problem 1: How much do I have left to spend?

With many finance workflows happening at the end of the month, teams usually don’t have real-time reporting on their spending. This means that your marketing team most likely does the following:

What makes this worse is that, from interviews with marketing specialists, the marketing teams are forced to assign one of their colleagues on expense tracking duty. This usually takes up a lot of their time and clearly isn’t the most exciting activity of their day.

Problem 2: Reconciling expenses with T&E expense workflows

One job that a marketing specialist should not do, is reconcile expenses – that’s the role of the finance team. Yet, some marketing teams are forced to use T&E-like workflows from Concur, Intact, etc. which were designed to capture diverse expenses that occur on a sales trip.

Current workflow:

• Create an expense report
• Write out charges as line items for each campaign
• Attach invoices
• Categorize transactions
• Match expense to transaction from the bank statement

This workflow is extremely inefficient and clearly wasn’t designed for marketing expenses. Oh and by the way, online advertising platforms charge you on daily basis, so you have to do this EVERY DAY just to keep up with your spending. Not great… 😢

Possible solutions

Excel sheet

Marketing needs to keep their own books: an excel sheet that you need to update every day with daily campaign spend from all accounts across the entire team. This will require someone to spend hours every day collecting spend from all accounts and will cost a fortune in inefficient use of labour. Excel sheet is more like a flex tape.

Virtual cards 🌈

A much better approach is to use technology that was designed to solve this problem. Virtual cards have been built for the trucking industry to get visibility over trucker’s cashflows. Similarly, in marketing virtual cards can offer a lot of benefits:

• Real-time spend visibility – you are always in the know how much you’ve spent
• Set and forget – label a virtual card with accounting tags once and all transactions will be automatically tagged for you
• Spend control – assign cards with limits to employees, campaigns or channels to always be aware of where the money is going
• and more… flexible limits, easy receipt capture, secure payments, easy card sharing

So the virtual cards can automate all of the accounting for your marketing team and relief the pressure off the finance team’s reporting function!