Payment solutions ■
Betty Low
many departments. Using contract labour is an example. “A problem area for companies is consultancy or contracted labour. Virtual cards work for these people because you can set your tolerances for these cards and have the travel policy which can be policed. Everything can go through on the virtual card and the contractor doesn’t have to take receipts or circumvent policies.”
MEETINGS Another big area that affects many stakeholders is meetings. Nicola Winchester is a senior travel buyer at a global professional services company (see panel, right). She shares her travel team’s experience in introducing a cor- porate meeting card programme. “We knew from the procurement prospec- tive that we wanted to put a corporate meeting card into the process. It’s better for planners, and suppliers get paid in a timely fashion.” There was initial resistance from finance because the card included the capacity for planners to spend a large amount of money at one time. “While we knew it was the right thing to do, we had to demonstrate what was in it for them,” says Winchester. The travel team worked to demonstrate to their finance colleagues that “by implement- ing this card we would get technology to help them streamline the whole process of accounting and reconcilia- tion, and that suppliers would get paid on time.”
12 BBT CORPORATE CARDS SUPPLEMENT 2017
Due diligence showed that there
would be a lot of visibility around people using the cards, and Winchester says: “Finance is now very supportive. Make sure you’re educating your stake- holders of the benefits.” Educating stakeholders meant
involving the teams that were organis- ing a lot of meetings – namely learning and development – and the marketing department, which is responsible for many client events. According to Winchester, the data coming from using a meetings card
has been very valuable for finance, but she feels that the largest overall benefit for the organisation has been in efficiency. Her work exemplifies the philosophy “understand how your own business functions and what the tools are going to do for your business”. A success- ful payments programme will need collaboration – among travellers and managers, among departments and among customers and suppliers. It’s a challenge for which walls will not provide solutions.●
Collaborating to introduce a ‘P-Card’
A purchasing card (P-Card), also known as a procurement card, is a company charge card enabling holders to buy certain B2B goods and services. It can be configured to set spending limits and restricted to approved merchants or categories. Multinational travel buyer Nicola Winchester says her team, which sits within procurement, owns the P-Card because it owns the strategy and contract relationship for the corporate card. The administration of the card is owned by finance, because “ultimately it’s finance which pays the bill.” Winchester has responsibility for exploring how to expand usage of the P-Card outside the US. “There are probably a lot of organisations like us who are trying to work out how to use P-Cards effectively,” she says. “Lots of investigative work needs to happen to make sure the product is right for the business. If you put in a programme you’ve got to make sure it’s utilised. “We’re a client-serving organisation, and a lot of our clients want to pay us with
P-Cards so we have to accept as well as use. So we try to make sure we’re clear as to whom we’re targeting. What is the quantity of spend? What countries? What commodities? Unless you do that exercise, you’ll have P-Cards but your programme will never take off, it will stagnate.” It is also important to work with your card provider, which knows the accepting
merchants and can help expand acceptance and usage. “It’s critical that you don’t try to do this in isolation from your provider,” says Winchester. “You have to be with them and you need their expertise.”
In association with
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36