Everything you need to know about Open’s Corporate Cards
Corporate cards are now growing in popularity thanks to the efficiency and flexibility they offer. Not to mention, using corporate cards makes life easier for everyone — be that of the employee, or the accountant, or you the business owner.
By streamlining the entire business expenditure, corporate cards help in reducing costs. This is done by avoiding overspending, monitoring expense reporting, tracking employee spending, and also by analyzing vendor/subscription preferences.
Definitely, using corporate cards is, well, good for your business.
There’s a catch though.
Usually, card networks and legacy banks have multiple offers in-store when it comes to offering bigger corporations with a card of their own choice. Small businesses and startups though, often struggle to even be eligible for one.
On top of it, when it comes to choosing a corporate card, business owners or founders or even their finance team often have a lot of questions in mind. To begin with:
What exactly is a corporate card?
A corporate card is a type of debit or credit card that helps companies track employee spending and monitor other expenses on a regular and detailed basis. In other words, by issuing a corporate card a company aims to track every rupee that it intends to spend. It can be for business travel or for paying online subscriptions or even for paying the local t-shirt company to buy branded t-shirts for your employees.
How does a corporate card work?
Corporate cards come with a spendable limit. If it’s a credit card, it will have a set credit limit. If it’s a debit card, its spendable limit will be tied to the amount in the account it is linked with. Corporate cards can be used wherever credit or debit cards can be used.
What are the different types of corporate cards?
Well for starters the most popular type of corporate card is a corporate credit card. Usually, these credit cards are issued by a card issuance company like VISA or Mastercard in partnership with a bank or a third-party issuer.
Corporate credit cards are the most sought-after credit cards since they help in separating personal and business expenses. Small businesses or startups more often than not end up using a personal credit card since it’s not easy to get a corporate credit card from the banks without hefty collateral.
That’s why growing businesses are always looking out for a smart and secure business credit card that can fulfill their immediate and growing needs of emergency credit.
Then there are prepaid cards that can come in two forms. One is a virtual card that is generated digitally and the other is a physical card.
The idea of using a corporate card, irrespective of what kind of card it is, is to take the hassle out of expenses monitoring and avoid the long hours spent on reconciling every month.
Since it is important for businesses to monitor their spending, Open has built a complete expense management solution which it offers to its users via its corporate cards.
Why use corporate cards by Open?
Open’s corporate cards can be used anywhere a credit or a debit card is accepted, including making international payments. Not only is it a dedicated card for all your business expenses, every transaction you make with it is recorded with category and merchant or vendor or subscription-wise.
In other words, if you make payments with Open’s corporate cards, you don’t have to spend any time manually reconciling any transactions. All your payments will be automatically reconciled with the automated accounting module that comes with an Open account.
How to get Open’s corporate card?
Open has partnered with VISA to bring you the smartest corporate cards in town, and you can get them in a couple of easy steps. Simply sign up on Open and complete your KYC, including providing your basic business details and verifying your PAN card and Aadhaar card.
That’s it! You can start using your corporate card as per your needs.
What are the additional benefits of using Open’s corporate card?
Spending is rewarding on Open. The more payments you make with your Open corporate card, the more rewards you will get which includes highly sought-after discounts and access to various SaaS products available in the Apps section on Open. These curated apps and SaaS-based platforms help your business to grow.
What is Open’s virtual card? Is it different from a corporate card?
A virtual card is essentially a digitally-generated, non-physical card that can be generated and assigned to a team member and/or pay for a specific subscription or a digital campaign. It is accepted everywhere debit and credit cards are used.
The best part of Open’s virtual cards is that they function like debit cards. This means you or any of the admin can load the card with a preset spend limit from the Open account directly and hand it over to the employee or team for the specific spend. This helps in avoiding spending twice or spending out of budget.
In short, virtual cards are not really different from corporate cards. These cards are just specifically designed to make online payments. And they function exactly like a physical debit or credit card.
How does Open’s prepaid expense card work?
Open’s prepaid expense cards are pretty similar to virtual cards — the only difference is that they are physical cards and are issued to employees or teams who need to make offline transactions. These include business travel & lodging, food expenses, any other admin or HR expenses like buying office supplies offline or paying vendors offline, etc.
The best part about Open’s prepaid cards is that it does not require you to save receipts of your offline purchase. Every time you swipe the card, you’ll instantly get a notification on your WhatsApp no. asking you to take a picture of the receipt and upload it on WhatsApp directly.
No need to save those hundreds of receipts anymore. Every time you upload the receipt as a picture on WhatsApp, the transaction details get automatically reconciled with the help of Open’s powerful automated accounting module.
How to choose the right corporate card for your business?
Open is constantly evolving to provide our users — business owners and founders like you — the best services in business banking and finance. That includes simplifying your expenses and reconciliation workflow with the help of our smart and powerful VISA corporate cards.
Be it for online subscription payments or offline transactions, Open has got you covered. Our corporate cards will help you make payments the easiest way and auto-match every payment against its receipt, be it online or offline.
If you’ve any further questions on how our corporate cards work or how we can help your business specifically, leave your comments below and we will address them right away!
You can also sign up on Open and explore all that we have to offer to your business. Aside from simplifying your expenses, we connect your banking, payments, and accounting to give you a unified and real-time view of your cash flow and the financial health of your business.
So, what’s the wait for? Sign up on Open, get your corporate card, run your banking, payments, accounting, and expenses together and grow your business.
