Most companies just assume that spending is designed to be difficult. They're basically back where they started: a few cards for key executives, but teams still can't spend when they need to.Īnd that's usually where it ends. This is too hard to manage and makes life tough for finance teams, so they roll this back. They realize that access to funds is a blocker for teams, so they roll out corporate cards across the board. In speaking with countless companies, we hear a familiar pattern over and over: So credit card companies simply offered the minimum viable product - essentially a personal credit card in an executive’s name - and we’ve been living with these ever since. Early corporate cards were launched as a way to avoid the painful expense report process - if employees didn’t have to pay with their own money, they wouldn’t need to make expense claims. They’re hard to control, open to fraud, and for these reasons most employees can’t get their hands on them.Īnd if your employees can’t use them, this creates a serious bottleneck for companies that want to move quickly.Īll of these issues stem from the fact that company cards weren’t really created for companies at all.

We’ve written several times about the problems with company credit cards. P-cards go by a range of different names:Įven if there are slight differences between some on that list, they’re all a more modern alternative to traditional corporate credit cards. And as we’ll see, modern P-cards also provide certain functionalities that traditional corporate cards can’t, making them a better fit for the job. Also known as procurement cards, they let employees purchase what they need quickly and efficiently, and record all the most important transaction details as they go.įor this reason, purchasing cards are a far more efficient way of dealing with smaller company payments than typical procurement methods. Purchasing cards let employees spend at work without having to go through the formal purchasing or accounts payable process.

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