Small businesses spend almost $500 billion on business credit cards every year, which they use as a source of operating capital. But banks don’t give small business credit cards the same instant data and notifications as enterprise corporate credit cards.
As a result, small business accountants struggle with three main issues:
- No visibility into expenses made on company cards because they don’t get real-time card transaction data. They have to download statements from their bank portal every month.
- They have to constantly follow up with employees to submit receipts, which is a frustrating process, and manually match them with every transaction in the statement.
- It often takes days for accountants to code expenses to the correct GL, assign them to the correct department, project or client, and finally make manual entries into an accounting system like QBO, Netsuite or Sage Intacct.
The fact that small business accountants don’t have real-time visibility into their own credit card spend data creates multiple hiccups in accounting, and leaves them dependent on an extremely time-consuming and error-prone process that takes days of manual effort.
What is the partnership and why is it important?
Fyle solves this problem in an extremely efficient and simple way. We directly integrate with payment networks like Visa and Mastercard to offer real-time spend data to small businesses, completely bypassing the dependence on banks. In 2022, Fyle built a direct integration with Visa, and with this release we also have a direct integration with Mastercard, covering 75% of the corporate credit card spend market.
This means that accountants can get to see their card transaction data on the Fyle dashboard in real-time every time the card is swiped, on their existing bank-issued credit cards that are on the Visa or Mastercard network (Chase Ink business cards, Capital One Spark cards, Bank of America business cards, etc).
Fyle’s integrations with Visa and Mastercard completely change the game when it comes to the problems small business accountants face.
- Businesses get a real-time view of when and where their employees are spending on tier cards since Fyle’s AI-enabled expense management software works with any existing business cards from any bank.
- Employees receive a text message the moment they swipe their business credit card. All they have to do is reply to this text with a photo of the receipt. There’s no need to save paper receipts, no need to open another app, no need to sit at their laptops and manually create an expense report. In fact, we’ve seen a 48% reduction in time to submit receipts after our customers move to text message based receipt submission. Our OCR pulls data from the photo, and the AI engine codes and categorizes the expense accurately.
- Fyle automatically matches the receipts with the correct card transaction within seconds, eliminating the need for human intervention.
- The fully-coded expense data is then automatically pushed to accounting software like QBO, Sage Intacct, Xero or NetSuite.
This approach saves a huge amount of manual work and frustration for accountants. They don’t have to constantly remind employees to submit receipts, and the manual process of reconciliation is completely eliminated. In fact, they get data that is clean, error-free, correctly coded & categorized and ready to be pushed into their accounting software.
What does the future hold?
Most accountants we talk to still don’t know this is possible and are delighted when they see this entire workflow. The world is still used to submitting expense reports via a mobile app, or via spreadsheets along with paper receipts. There is acceptance for expense management just being a slow, tedious process that has to be done manually.
We anticipate that in the next two years, this will completely change. All business users will demand easy-to-use, powerful software that integrates directly with their credit cards, and ensures that not a single moment is spent on expense management.
Through partnerships like these, we at Fyle want to be at the forefront of that change.
Yashwanth Madhusudan is co-founder and CEO of Fyle.
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