It’s commonly understood that employee productivity is essential to the profitability of businesses. 

A joint report released by the Australian Productivity Commission and New Zealand Productivity Commission on how to maximise the opportunities for SMEs in the digital economy, found that productivity is increased when businesses adopt digital tools, such as cloud computing and analytics. 

“To realise productivity gains from investments in digital technology, firms and governments need to make complementary investments in skills and process improvements.” [i]

With the right credit card or charge card for your business, you may have access to tools that can help streamline the processes of managing spending and cash flow cycles, while keeping a watchful eye the balance sheet. 

Proactively Manage Your Spending 

Finding the right tool to help you get on top of your spending may help streamline the reconciliation of expenses and especially if your employees are travelling frequently and incurring a range of different expenses, such as meals, taxis and accommodation. 

Issuing employee business cards that are linked to a central account may help reduce reimbursements for out-of-pocket expenses. 

Business spending tools can offer:

• Shareable custom expense reports
• Detailed transaction reporting
• Spending limits and alerts (on an employee basis)
• Automatic alerts for unusual transactions
• Accounting software integration

Keep Cash Flowing

Managing cash flow cycles effectively and efficiently is essential for businesses to thrive. Having access to ready cash for when you need it could mean being able to take advantage of opportunities to grow your business or to invest in innovation and infrastructure.

Cash flow management is more complex than ensuring you have sufficient funds to cover outgoings. 

There is a range of cash flow tools available that offer forecasting features, which can help guide your business planning and drive efficiency by integrating with your accounting software.

Further efficiencies can be found with business cards that offer virtual payment solutions to pay suppliers that don’t accept card payments. Some virtual payment solutions may help reduce manual payments with automated payment features. 

Save Time with Software Integration

Expense reconciliation can be manual and very time consuming. Research conducted by MYOB shows that integrating business credit card feeds that automatically import and match financial transactions into cloud accounting software may save business owners an average of 10 hours per month.

Over a year, this represents an expensive overhead for your business, so finding ways to streamline, automate and simplify your financial management can free up more time for you to grow your business.

Leveraging  business tools can help streamline your processes, saving you time and money. Once you’ve investigated which tools may benefit your business and decided which features you need, you might then confirm that your card provider offers complimentary features that integrate into your systems. 

[i] Source: Australian Productivity Commission and New Zealand Productivity Commission 2019, Growing the digital economy in Australia and New Zealand. Maximising opportunities for SMEs.