Organizations with a remote or hybrid workforce have found themselves reimbursing employees for a lot of business expenses (such as home-office setups) in the recent past. And with business travel on the upswing, many organizations are back to the work of collecting receipts for travel expenses so they can pay employees back. 

The work of reimbursing employees slows down the pace of business for organizations. There’s a smarter, faster way to address the reality of today’s remote-work landscape than relying on employees’ receipts. 

Virtual credit cards—though newer to the scene—equip employees to pay for business expenses anytime, anywhere. By pushing virtual credit cards to employees’ smartphones, you give them everything they need to make business purchases within your existing corporate card controls—while you gain real-time visibility into transactions and a better understanding of your operating costs. 

Doing better by employees.

Giving employees access to physical corporate credit cards to pay for business or travel expenses is only sometimes feasible when your staff works remotely. In a work-from-anywhere world, you can't simply hand a plastic card to someone and retrieve it when they're done booking a flight or registering for a conference.

Asking employees to make business purchases using their personal credit cards is an alternative option, but it’s far from ideal.

“There's a lot of emotion tied to using our personal cards to pay for business expenses,” says Laretha Elliott, vice president, group product manager at U.S. Bank. “As employees, we consider it a loan—we're loaning our company money and giving them time to pay us back while we pay interest on that amount.”

“Our finances also are very personal,” adds Elliott. “When our company asks us to pay, we may have to reveal things that we don't want to reveal—like that we don’t have personal credit cards or can't afford to put business spend on our personal cards.”

Extended reimbursement times and strict payroll schedules can also strain employees' patience just as much as their finances. The wait for reimbursement introduces an employee satisfaction issue; it's frustrating and inefficient to wait for reimbursement (or worse, wait for an actual check to come in the mail).

Achieving better, faster insights.

The inefficiency stems from reimbursement processes that tend to be cumbersome, error-prone and slow. 

“For organizations, getting receipts after the fact slows down the process of understanding their operational costs and cost of doing business in an environment where organizations need that understanding in real-time,” says Elliott.

With virtual credit cards, organizations can eliminate the challenges of reimbursements while still empowering employees to make payments and business-related purchases. 

Virtual credit cards, like the U.S. Bank Instant Card®, allow organizations to equip employees with cards through mobile wallets on smartphones they already use. A virtual credit card is a unique 16-digit account number for which you determine and set spending limits, restricted merchant category codes (MCC) and an expiration date (so it deactivates automatically). 

By having employees use virtual cards, organizations gain visibility into transactions. This not only helps them prevent fraud and misuse—but also reduces administrative costs by eliminating the back-end paperwork of reimbursements and ensuring internal policy adherence.

“Eliminating or even just decreasing the number of reimbursements brings tremendous efficiency by reducing time spent on paperwork,” says Elliott. “And driving up policy adherence is a big deal. If I’m using my own funds for something, I’m less likely to understand what the policy is than if I'm using something that my organization has given me—and every time there's a policy violation, it takes time and resources to figure it out.”

With MCC blocks, the policy is auto-enforced. As a result, organizations can apply the same controls to virtual cards as they apply to their corporate cards, or apply unique rules for cards' temporary use. In any instance, organizations gain visibility into transactions and the ability to better keep up with operating costs. 

"Virtual cards help expedite understanding of costs and give organizations transparency into spending in real-time," says Elliott.

Conclusion: Making things easier.

Ultimately, virtual credit cards can streamline expense- and payments-related processes to make things easier for remote employees and payments teams. With reimbursements dragging down organizations’ ability to understand operating costs, it’s time for a more innovative approach to expenses and payments that speeds up the pace of business while equipping remote employees with the buying power they need.