From the Desk of Kevin Tiernan, Bankers Trust

5 Reasons Your Business Should Use P-Cards 

Purchasing cards (p-cards) are a type of commercial credit card that allow your company’s employees to make payments for goods and services without using a traditional, paper-based purchasing process. The increasing popularity of p-cards is due to a number of benefits they bring, such as efficiency, accuracy, control, security and even profitability. Here’s a breakdown of each:

1. P-cards are more efficient than traditional purchase processes

Many companies see efficiency as the biggest benefit of using p-cards rather than a traditional purchasing process. With the traditional process, which consists of using personal credit cards and filing expense reports, your company’s accounting department must manually submit each transaction and receipt employees submit.

Issuing p-cards greatly reduces the amount of manual organization and review your company must do to track their employees’ transactions. This is because p-cards are integrated within your existing expense management systems, which is made up of many general ledgers (GLs) – or categories of expenses – such as travel, office supplies, meals with prospective clients, etc. Each time a transaction is made, it is automatically factored into a GL, reducing the amount of time and effort needed to organize expenses.

 2. P-cards reduce human error, leading to better accounting accuracy

In addition to providing a faster and more efficient alternative, p-cards also leave less room for accounting errors. While p-card transactions are automatically filed under their GLs, transactions made with the traditional process must be entered manually, which sometimes results in submitting the wrong transaction amount or filing a transaction under the wrong GL. Having an accurate report of transactions is important in ensuring you detect problem spending areas and stay within budgets.

3. P-cards give you more control over where purchases are made

Your business’s accounting team can place limits and restrictions on how and where employees use their p-cards. For example, you can place dollar limits on how much an employee or department can spend and select which types of businesses employees can make purchases from. Such limits and restrictions minimize the possibility of employee misuse that you are more vulnerable to with a traditional purchasing process.

 4.P-cards offer added security

Because p-cards are set up to block transactions from unauthorized merchants, they offer more protection from fraud. Additionally, you can receive reports on all transactions made with p-cards, which provides insight into how money was spent and if any suspicious charges were made.

5. P-cards can help reduce internal costs

Not only is the traditional method of filing expense reports and submitting print receipts a hassle for employees, it’s also more expensive for the employer. The manual component of handling transactions in traditional processes requires more of an employee’s time to sort through piles of expense reports and receipts. Implementing p-cards means less time and work organizing expenses, and therefore, an opportunity for your business to save on internal costs.

Whether you manage the finances of a large corporation or a mid-market company, implementing p-cards can help streamline and improve the accuracy and security of your employees’ transactions. Contact the Bankers Trust Treasury Management team to learn how to get started.

Kevin Tiernan serves as SVP, Treasury Management Manager at Bankers Trust. He has nearly 15 years of banking experience in treasury management and retail banking and holds designation as a Certified Treasury Professional.