From helping Aussie businesses for the last 3+ years (and we’ve helped thousands), we’ve learnt that obtaining credit cards for your mobile workforce can often feel like chasing a fleeting summer romance, only to be rejected in the end.
We've created this article to provide you with alternative solutions to get business funds into the hands of your staff, without the hassle of dealing with big banks and the frustration of pulling out your hair (or a broken heart).
Our story begins with Sandy. Sandy runs an all Aussie NFP where community support services are dished out faster than a dance move at Rydell High.
Her business supports our most vulnerable including at risk youth, victims of domestic and family violence and those that are just down on their luck and might need a helping hand.
Sandy is a spirited individual, with a heart shinier than Danny Zuko’s slicked-back hair. Her mission was grand: to expand the business to every state so that we can support more communities.
With hiring more staff, in multiple locations to help with the expansion, Sandy ran into trouble. Her staff and volunteers needed access to business funds faster than you can say “Grease is the word”, in order to support the community.
This was the problem. How do we easily obtain cards for spending?
Sandy thought that a couple of credit cards would be the best bet. Sandy found herself facing the blues:
Some of our new employees were members of Sandy’s current business bank, some were not. Sandy found that for those that were, they could fill out an online application, but for those that weren’t, the bank required that Sandy and the employee go into a branch, present 100 points of ID and fill out a paper application! With trying to expand to other states, this became a logistical (dancing) nightmare.
Then we had Sandy’s army of volunteers, giving up their time to give back to our communities. Sandy realised getting a corporate credit card for them was as elusive as catching the T-Birds doing homework. Sandy began to think about it, "I need funds, in the hands of my staff and volunteers so we can support the community. Why is the default always 'credit cards' when it’s this difficult?"
"Having the flexibility to organise cards whenever we needed them has made it significantly easier to get funds to staff"
~ ONCALL Group Australia
In order to provide credit facilities to businesses in Australia, banks need to follow very strict regulations and there’s nothing wrong with that. It actually makes Australia one of the safest places in the world for preventing Financial Crime.
But there are easier ways to get funds in the hands of your staff an volunteers. We’ll look at some options for you below:
Freebie - Staff Reimbursements
Sandy considered staff reimbursements. They could use their own money to make purchases on the go and they could fill out a reimbursement claim.
This meant Sandy didn’t have to go through the pain of trying to get credit cards for her full time employees but also became an ethical dilemma. “I don’t want to make my staff use their own money for business expenses, and I definitely don’t want to tell my volunteers to. What about large business purchases? What about all the time it’s going to take me to process all these reimbursements?”
Sandy could find more problems than benefits with this option but, if you’re a business with a small crew and pocket-sized expenses, staff reimbursements could be the word. Sure, it's a free solution, minus the time it takes to waltz through those reimbursement claims but that in itself isn’t free.
If you are considering staff reimbursements and you use XERO, they have an expenses app which is a free add on which can help with receipt collection.
"Our previous expense process was highly manual. Staff were paying for things, and we had to reimburse them afterwards. We didn’t want our staff to spend their money, so Budgetly has solved our problems. The whole process is now much more efficient and easier to manage."
~ Hotham Mission
Not-So-Free but Wallet-Friendly
Sandy didn’t want to force her staff to spend their own money and then wait to be reimbursed. It clashed with her vision of supporting the community. “How can I claim to support the community if I don’t fully support and empower our staff?”
Sandy considered one-off prepaid cards/gift cards.
“We could purchase a once off Visa card from Coles and hand them out to our staff”, Sandy thought to herself. It solved the problem of obtaining cards, it sounded easier than teaching Danny Zuko to slow dance but she’d either have to purchase them and post them out or cash advance her staff so they could make the purchase.
It meant staff could access funds for spending, but then Sandy found it cause more headaches than it solved:
- Chasing receipts was impossible!
- We had no real time visibility on transactions
- Issuing cards was incredibly manual
- Reconciling the transactions into Xero took days and days.
"If we continued using the gift vouchers, we’d still have limited visibility over transactions and spending. We did consider moving to credit cards with our bank; however, this still would have given us little oversight."
~ MH&R Holdings
Sandy considered just cash advancing her staff so they could use their own cards but all of the above problems still existed plus the added problem of the risk of staff not returning funds once they left Sandy’s NFP.
"We didn’t want our staff to be out of pocket when making purchases on behalf of the business. That’s why we setup expense accounts for the majority of staff. However, problems arose with staff turnover as it was often difficult to recover funds from those expense accounts. Budgetly has solved all of this. No more risk!"
~ Family Centred
Full Automation: The Holy Grail:
When it’s too much hassle trying to obtain cards from the bank, you're knee-deep in receipts and you’d just like to focus on doing what you do best, like Sandy was in our story, it's time for the grand finale – full automation!
If you’re looking for full automation with expense management, including instantly issuing VISA corporate cards to your staff and volunteers, you can find solutions that offer:
- Instant card issuance
- Receipt capture and transaction coding
- Smart budgets with spending rules
- Real time visibility on transactions vs budgets they’re being spent from
- One-click sync into Xero.
Budgetly is the leading solution.
Our recommendation is to check out an independent review site like Capterra to see what others are saying to help you make a decision.
Some questions to ask yourself:
- Do they offer telephone support, free training etc?
- Is their support based in Australia or is it off-shore?
- Do they offer both physical and virtual cards or virtual only?
- Are there other businesses like mine already using their solution?
We hope the info provided helps with the numerous challenges that come with trying to obtain corporate credit cards. From reading this you may have discovered that you have a few more problems with your expense process.
Want to look at the holy grail of expense automation?
The next best step is to talk to an expert - we offer free 1 to 1 consultations where will ask a series of questions to better understand your businesses’ specific problems and what’s most important for you to solve at this time.
We also have other helpful articles if you’d like to explore further in your own time. And if you're not quite ready for a personal parley, we've got an entire treasure chest of resources – feel free to dive in and explore.
