Choosing the right spend management software for your business

Spend management can be a nightmare

Keeping track of every single outgoing that your company racks up can be a headache. But with the right spend management software, you can make light work of this task, giving you more time to grow your business.

A good software will give you freedom, flexibility, and security, making the task of managing spend simple. But why isn’t it always this easy?

Traditional methods can’t keep up

Petty cash

Before any sort of software came to mainstream use, a popular way to manage business spend was with petty cash. With this system, businesses allocate a petty cash box for employee expenses, which individuals dip into when necessary. They would then spend the cash and file the receipt, before the finance team reconciles all the spend at the end of the period.

For many reasons, this was inefficient. Cash is easy to steal, difficult to track, and a nightmare to reconcile. A physical medium needs a physical ‘software’, and so petty cash log books were used to track expenditure, a process that’s slow and prone to errors.

Ultimately, petty cash is not a system that’s fit for modern business.

Business credit cards

A more up to date option for spend management comes in the form of business credit cards. This is a type of credit card offered by banks for the sole purpose of corporate spending.

It’s much more popular than petty cash, and it is more convenient, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. In fact, business credit cards suffer from some of the same issues as petty cash. For example, to use these corporate cards effectively, you have to maintain a stockpile of receipts. This is a tedious system that’s vulnerable to human error, which can cause problems when it comes to bookkeeping.

On top of this, businesses often share one card amongst a whole team, leading to issues surrounding access and accountability. If someone else has the card, you can’t use it, and it can be easy to lose track of who’s spent what.

And while you can use a banking app with your business credit card, most providers’ software offerings aren’t suited to detailed analysis or tight control of company outgoings. To really stay on top of expenditure, your best bet is to go for a spend management software that gives you complete control and visibility.

The possibilities of prepaid

Soldo is designed to offer the complete control and visibility that you need. Our solution is smart prepaid cards that give you more versatility than traditional payment cards. You simply load them up with a particular budget and your team can go out and spend without having to make purchase requests or file expense claims.

These can be virtual or physical cards; continuous or single use. You can assign as many as you’d like, depending on the needs of your business. Every staff member could have one, or just department heads. Make it unique to your requirements.

This way, you can always know who’s paid for what and you can be sure there’ll be no overspending. And if any of these cards should ever go missing, you can turn them off remotely in just a touch of a button.

And Soldo isn’t just prepaid cards. Our spend management software lets you take these cards to the next level, and will change the way you handle finances for the better. Here’s how it works.

Sensational spend management software

Soldo’s software is designed to make every step of the business spend management process simple. We’re aware of the issues that plague other payment methods, and we’ve got solutions for each one.

Flexibility

Systems like petty cash and business credit cards are very rigid. Obviously, there are no spend controls you can put on physical money other than a padlock on your petty cash box. And business credit cards can’t be customised in a way that lets them keep up with the way that businesses work today.

Soldo’s system is different: it’s designed for maximum flexibility. Once you’ve ordered your cards, you can establish individual controls for each one. So if you want one card to only be used for online software subscriptions, then you can set spend categories to make this happen. By removing particular categories of spend from a card’s functionality, you can have specific cards for specific purposes.

Alternatively, if you want the card user to have complete freedom, then simply don’t establish any categories and put the trust in them to spend sensibly within the established budget.

All of these controls can be set from Soldo’s software for desktop or mobile.

Visibility

Another common issue with traditional payment methods is that you don’t know what’s been spent until it’s too late. Either your finance team will have to rely on manual methods to add up the outgoings, or you can wait for credit card statements to come through. Both can be time consuming and slow.

With Soldo’s software, you know about every transaction as it happens. When your team goes out to spend, they use their prepaid card and upload a photo of their receipt. This data is then immediately available in the Soldo console for admins to view, and is used to automatically generate expense reports. You can even set notifications to tell you when a transaction happens.

This way, you can view company-wide spending across every card, and gain detailed insights into the spending habits of your team. Soldo means you can make data-led decisions when it comes to spend management.

And once you’ve gathered your data, you can transfer it to your preferred accounting software with our seamless integrations.

Security

With Soldo, there’s no need to worry about security either. Because of the customisable nature of our cards, you can set spending limits for a certain period, and there’s no way for company purchases to exceed that budget. This means no more unexpected costs.

On top of this, Soldo’s cards are much more resistant to theft and fraud than other methods. You can turn cards off from anywhere, so if one ever goes missing or gets stolen, you can simply flick a switch from the Soldo software and there’s no chance of any money going missing.

We also offer single-use virtual cards which disappear once the payment has gone through, meaning details can’t be stolen. And because none of these cards are connected to your business bank account, the company coffers are completely secure.

A plan for every business

With numerous Soldo plans to suit businesses of every size, there’s an option for everyone. So why not make the switch to smarter spending with Soldo’s software. Signing up takes no time at all and there’s no need for a credit check.

For total flexibility, real-time visibility, and increased security, join Soldo today.