It’s great to have a business credit card. Team lunches, business travel, subscriptions, software—charge it and avoid the hassle of submitting expenses for reimbursement. But these cards are usually entrusted only to a few sales people and senior management. But rather than handing off your physical card to employees who need to make ad hoc purchases, shouldn’t there be a better way?

Extend makes it easy to create virtual cards from your existing credit card.

Virtual cards are a randomly generated digital card number with a unique security and expiration date. Virtual cards help prevent fraud by protecting the real card number, and make it easier to gain real-time visibility into expenses. Here are four ways virtual cards can help you maximize your business credit card.

1. Easily create “sub cards” for employees, freelancers, interview candidates, and others.

Managing credit card distribution is time-consuming - and, as noted above, not a perk available to most rank-and-file employees. With Extend, you can issue a “virtual card” - a credit card number linked to your business credit card - to anyone via their email address. The virtual card number arrives immediately, so your staff or contractors can buy supplies or book travel without the hassle of using personal cards - or filing expense reports.

Extend’s virtual card controls help empower employees to make approved purchases on the company’s behalf. If you’ve agreed your analyst should subscribe to a new database, provide them with a virtual card that has a pre-set limit. The analyst can take ownership of the process and avoid the hassle of submitting a monthly expense report.

2. Simplify reconciliation.

With Extend, all virtual card charges will immediately show up in the corporate account, so you avoid the tedious process of tracking receipts, reconciling them, and filling out paper forms for approval. If you have a monthly subscription, set spending limits based on the subscription amount, and create rules to have the amount automatically refilled monthly. This is an easy way to handle subscriptions or per diem accounts. You can also create different virtual cards for specific projects. Client A’s charges go against one card; Client B’s against another. For invoicing, the finance department just downloads the charges assigned to each client’s number. You can get as granular as you like: your accounting team may opt to assign general ledger numbers to specific virtual card numbers, so real-time spending maps automatically back to your ledger.

3. Increase security.

A standard business credit card practically hands over the keys to your company’s financial kingdom. The card itself may impose an overall spending limit, but that’s typically a pretty high ceiling with few other controls in place.

With virtual cards powered by Extend, you set a spending limit specific to the individual and their spending needs. Using virtual cards helps you safeguard your company’s main credit line. You can instantly modify any virtual card—say, an employee leaves your company. Simply deactivate their virtual card so it can no longer be used.

With Extend’s real-time reporting, the finance department can also track spending to ensure compliance. Advanced users can use the Extend API to exclude certain merchant categories such as jewelry stores or online games, so virtual cards can only be used by certain merchants.

4. Maximize card rebates.

Because Extend virtual cards are tied to the underlying corporate card, the miles, points, cashback or rebates, go directly to the company. You can accrue rewards
and rebates with virtual cards the same way you do with your corporate card. When you have individuals who make company expenses use their personal cards, the
company misses out on those perks. Think of all the cash reimbursements you can now earn rewards on!