Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are always walking a fine line when it comes to how they handle payments, requiring a balance between safety and costs. Also, the ability to grow without excessive complexity. The virtual cards have become a game-changer to provide flexible, secure, and efficient payment management to emerging businesses.
What Are Virtual Cards for SMBs?
A virtual card is a payment card that is created digitally and is associated with your business bank account or credit line. It works as a regular credit or debit card, but, having no physical form, it is located in the virtual world. With online solutions (such as OnlineCheckWriter), SMBs are able to issue instant virtual cards to employees, departments, or vendors and have full spend control.
Why SMBs Are Turning to Virtual Cards
1. Enhanced Security for Business Payments
SMBs are increasingly being threatened by cybercrime and payment fraud. The virtual cards help to merchandise your primary account information as they will create unique card numbers every time and transaction and vendor, thus your primary account will be less exposed in case of a breach.
2. Flexible Spending Controls
Set individual limits to cards, place limits on where the card is used, or select an expiration date. This enhances easier control of budgets and unofficial charges.
3. Streamlined Expense Tracking
The transaction history of each virtual card is created, thus making payments easy according to departments/ projects or clients. This spare time is on monthly reconciliation and tax reports.
How SMBs Can Use Virtual Cards?
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Employee Purchases
Rather than giving a single corporate card, employees should have separate virtual cards to use on a plane ticket, office materials, or taking customers out. Put in pre-approved budgets so as to avoid overspending.
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Vendor & Supplier Payments
Assign different card numbers to different vendors so that this makes payments easy to track and there is no confusion.
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Subscription Management
Existing recurring services, e.g., software, cloud storage, or digital marketing tools, have their own dedicated virtual cards. This will enable cancellation at short notice without derailing other services.
Scaling with Virtual Cards
Scalable financial processes with minimal complexity are one of the greatest SMB issues. Scaling is simple using virtual cards, as it is possible to:
- Same day issuance to new branch/employees.Real-time tracking of spending on a company-wide basis.
- Connection with the accounting software allows for the management of costs automatically.
The virtual cards mean that you do not have to order and distribute physical cards to increase the number of cards in use as the business grows, saving you both time and operational costs.
Example
OnlineCheckWriter helps a minor marketing firm to produce virtual cards on every advertisement platform (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn). Monitoring their spend on a platform basis, they are able to manage their costs, avoid overspending, and not get into the situation of sharing a common card on different sites.
Final Thoughts
Virtual cards should not be viewed as a payment method but as a scaled financial management tool for SMBs. They provide unprecedented security, control, and flexibility to enable businesses to expand without compromising control.
The Virtual Card created by OnlineCheckWriter will allow a small business to use unlimited types of cards, control spending in real-time, and keep all transactions disabled.
