Recording Transcript:

So I’m going to cover what that looks like and ways that we can control that. And then, we’re going to wrap things up with credit card best practices. For those of you who haven’t launched your card program, I want to speak a little bit to the benefits of integrating your card program with TravelBank. And then, for those of you that do currently have an integration, these are things to be thinking about strategically and ways perhaps you can improve your card program or be kind of reframing how you’re interacting with TravelBank. So the first one is sort of a gimme, and a big reason why people come to TravelBank is streamlined expense tracking.

So integrations will allow for that automatic syncing of corporate card transactions with TravelBank. You’re reducing manual data entry, and with that, that cuts down the risk of errors. For those of you that have the credit card integration, you can see that specific fields tied to the expense flow right into TravelBank, and you actually don’t even have the ability to manipulate them. It’s coming right from your card-issuing bank. So that streamlined connection between your card program and TravelBank is full circle. The other piece of this is scalability in thinking about this.

So, as your company grows, integrating corporate cards with your expense solution can help you accommodate increasing transaction volumes, more complex transactions. You have the ability to tie splits and allocate expenses and then just that goal of efficiency. So whereas if you currently aren’t integrated or if you are really thinking about from the time that credit card transactions imports into TravelBank to the point of reconciliation, ways that you can simplify the process, cut down errors, and also just have a smoother reconciliation process all in all.

Another piece of this is policy compliance, and I’m going to jump into this in our demo, but you have the ability to enforce policy surrounding your credit card program. You have the ability to flag non-compliant transactions and then also be able to control overspending and then, even within TravelBank, create a refund a company if someone does accidentally make a charge on a credit card, and it needs to go back to your business.

Improved accountability. So this is a big one. So because you have that detailed transaction data, it’s readily available to you right in TravelBank, it’s easier to hold employees and managers accountable for their spending to ensure that their expenses are legitimate as well as they’re within other pieces of your policy as well as your budget. Now, when it comes to auditing, this is also an important piece. So you have an efficient audit trail.

You can utilize our transactions, export our expenses, export reporting in order to really have a clear visibility into that spending, and then report on that when auditing comes around. So you have complete and accurate records of those corporate card transactions within TravelBank, and it will really simplify that auditing process.

It also makes reporting easier. Why? Well, because all of your spend is in one place, whether you’re using TravelBank just for your credit card integration or for reimbursable expenses as well. You have a way to really be able to pull those reports with ease to understand not only spend that has already taken place and fully processed and closed, but in addition to that, tracking down those unassigned transactions, those that are tied to draft expense reports, excuse me, as well as those that are sitting with the manager. So a lot more insight into your overall spend.

And with using reporting, you can establish goals to make things more efficient to tighten up your budget. Or the last piece, establish a vendor negotiations. So, with all of this data in TravelBank, you can see how much money you’re spending with specific vendors and use that to really be able to negotiate better terms with vendors that you use frequently. So, with that said, now that I have everyone excited about card programs and getting integrated with TravelBank, I wanted to talk a little bit about the two ways in which we connect cards in TravelBank.

So this, if you all have been through implementation and establish your credit card program, then your implementation specialist probably asks you questions about if you have a corporate card and you take a look at it, does it say business or commercial card on it? And then the other piece of it is, do you have a relationship manager at your card issuing bank?

So for the example of if you have a relationship with… a relationship manager at your card issuing bank and you… or just a primary point of contact over there, your card says corporate or commercial, most likely, you are going to qualify for something that’s more of a corporate card feed, which would entail getting a little technical on you all. If your card issuing bank would work with Visa, MasterCard, or Amex to produce a file that sent directly to TravelBank and it imported on a schedule.

So those flow right in, and it would be a direct connection to your statement. For those of you that are small business card holders, don’t fret. We are completely card agnostic, and we use something called Plaid to connect your card issuing bank your card program over to TravelBank. So a little bit about Plaid because we do get questions about it frequently is Plaid essentially serves as an aggregator, so it securely connects your credit card data by connecting your card issuing bank with TravelBank seamlessly.

So I’m going to walk you through where to do that within the site. I can’t actually set it up. I tried to walk through it, and I accidentally sent a notification. I use my mom’s phone number as a test and sent a notification over to her. So we certainly don’t want to do that, but I will show you where to get started. But what it’s going to involve is adding in your phone number and then selecting your card issuing bank. And there is an extensive list there, and then adding your bank login credentials, and from there, it’s very simple to set up that integration.

I will walk through that here shortly as well. So just to pause, there are two different ways in which today we’re integrating data, that’s through the commercial card feed, which is a file feed directly from your bank, or through Plaid. With that, I know that we’re excited to dig in, so I am actually going to demonstrate the Plaid integration first and then take a deeper dive into our site in terms of credit cards. Bear with me for one moment while I switch gears, and we’ll get started here in just a second.

All right, so here we are. I am here in TravelBank, and I’m going to first show you how to integrate your Plaid card. So here we are. I logged into my account. I clicked company settings. And then I’m going to go over to corporate card connections. These are some card programs that we have a direct connection with, or this is where we can set up your Plaid account. As I spoke previously, this is our Plaid connection wizard. Essentially, you’ll hit continue. You have to put a phone number in.

As I said before, I was testing it yesterday, and I put my mom’s phone number in just to see if it let me bypass and actually sent it over to my mom. But in truth, you’re going to add your phone number, select your bank, and then put in your bank login credentials in order to connect that directly there. So, with that said, once you have your cards connected… I’m going to exit here. Once you have your cards connected, you’re going to want to navigate over to corporate cards, which is located under the managed tab. So I’m going to click into there, and with that, let’s… here we are going to review this corporate cards area.

So once your corporate card program has been set up, whether that’s through Plaid or working with our implementation team or our technical implementation specialist, I’m going to pause here also. For those of you that are live clients, don’t worry. You don’t have to go back into implementation. If you want to set up a commercial card feed, please feel free to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or success@travelbank.com, and we’ll get the ball rolling for you and connecting with your bank relationship manager and getting that file set up.

So there are a couple of pieces in place once that card is getting set up. You can either start with the starter file that’s going to send you this… the list of all your users, mass card numbers, spending limits, or with that, these actually are created as your users are set up in TravelBank, and they swipe, and those transactions flow over. So I want to walk you through this a little bit. As the cardholder information here, the last four of their card number, their spending limit tied to the card, and with that, I did want to say that this information actually is coming over from your bank feed.

So that information, if that does pop up, we can definitely work with your bank to ensure that those limits populate the expiration. And then this is something that’s really important that comes up a lot with questions. If you have a new card program and the cardholder’s name does not match that of the expense assignee, we need to make sure that we type their name in specifically and, from there, add them there. Also, another thing that I did want to call out is users can have multiple cards tied to their account. You just need to make sure you establish them as the expense assignee.

So I will pause there and then also just bump this out here just so you all see an example of what this looked like if you wanted to dive further into the view of the credit card. I did want to call out. This is a demo account, so you’ll notice that some of my cards may look a little old. This isn’t set up yet, and some of my examples of transactions may be dated. I’m not within policy, I’ll call that out. But this is supposed to serve as a reference point here. So with that, this is where you’re going to essentially manage all of those cards that are in here.

Also, within a file feed, if a card is inactive and not included in a file feed within 14 days, that will also roll off. Have no fear. The former transaction data for the employee will still remain within TravelBank. Something I did also want to bring up is once a card has been set up, you can view those transactions in a couple of different areas in my cards and transactions. This also, just to note, this, because this is a demo account, transactions that are more recent, so in the past 60 days, are available here. Because we get asked about this a lot, I did want to call it out and the fact that you do have the ability to sync a personal card.

So this is separate from that of your business program, but they do have the ability to sync that personal card. The one-call out I do need to make, and I generally tend to tell clients to avoid doing this only because this syncs everything. So if your employees are exclusively just using their personal card for business expenditures, that’s fine. If they’re going to be expensing things like their cell phone allowance or if you reimburse for a gym membership, those sorts of things will flow in. However, their Starbucks runs or going out to lunch or anything else will also flow in. So just to call that out, I think it’s an important thing to add if you do get asked about it.

All right. So, with that, I also did want to show how transactions look in the system for those of you who don’t have this set up. So, with that said, I did want to show you the information that comes through. So, at a glance, you can look at all of the expense details that are flowing in immediately from your card issuing bank, from your card program. So things like the posted date, transaction date, total amount of the expense, sales tax, broken out the merchant, merchant location, merchant category code and description. I have a lot of clients that actively use this.

This is also available within our transaction reporting if you tend like to code for approval purposes. Expense category. This is yet to be coded and then the department. So something that is kind of worth exploring here as well. Also, again, this is not best practice, and the fact that these are aging expenses and my demo account reconciliation process is a mess, but just wanted to call out a couple of things in terms of treatment with credit cards. The merchant, the date, the amount, as well as the payment method all defaults. Well, this defaults to corporate card, not non-reimbursable.

I will speak to that within policy in just one moment, but these, the user doesn’t have the ability to change. When I called out, one of the benefits of card programs is the fact that you have a great view of your expenses, but you’re also avoiding fraud and the fact that they have the ability… they don’t have the ability to make changes to these expenses here. All right. With that, I am going… Because I had mentioned policy here, I want to go into our policy to talk about ways in which we can control policy with our credit card program.

So this… anything that is tied to the credit card program is housed under general rules corporate card. I’m going to walk you through each of these, so I advise that you turn on if employees use a corporate card. These expenses will not be reimbursed. So this is what makes those transactions default to corporate card non-reimbursable. They’re locked down. The employee has no ability to say, “Oh, this is my personal expense.” That’s an important one to ensure that this is tied to this, especially if your employees are corporate card holders that reside within this policy.

Another thing is you must require merging of expense with corporate card transactions to ensure the fact that that transaction that’s coming in from your bank is linked properly to an expense, and they don’t have the ability to change that. It’s indicated once those two are merged by a blue link symbol. If there isn’t a transaction linked to a manually made corporate card expense, it’s… the symbol is red, meaning that there isn’t a transaction linked, and it is noted within when you’re reviewing an expense. So this requires the merging of an expense with that corporate card transaction.

A talk track around this, especially for those of you that are new to the card program, is that the corporate card transaction data takes between two and five business at times to import into the system. Reason being is there’s a little bit of a workflow that goes on behind the scenes. The employee makes a purchase, the merchant from there transmits that purchase information over to your card issuing bank, and then from there, the card issuing bank relays the information over to us, which is the reason why there is a delay. Giving you a peek behind the scenes, we are actively working on enhancing that.

So we will have real-time authorizations down the road, but at this time, something to coach around is you have to wait between those two and five days, and you have to wait for those transactions to flow over. Default payment method. When this is enabled, the employee’s payment method will default to corporate card on repeat expenses and those that are refunded to company. So important pieces in terms of the treatment of credit card. I’m going to kind of just scratch the surface here when we’re talking about transactions in the transactions area. I’m going to let it think for a second.

This is housed under manage transactions, and this is their direct linked right over from your card feed. What I like about this is it’s a really great way to proactively manage your company spend, see what’s coming in, but also possibly even monitor for fraudulent transactions that you may need to connect with your bank on. Something to call out here as well is this is a great way to keep track of unassigned transactions as well as those that have yet to be submitted using the filters based upon unassigned, meaning they’ve imported, they’re living on expenses and transaction, but not actively assigned to a report or actively assigned to a report.

These may be ones that you need to track down to ensure the fact that they are submitted according to your reconciliation periods. I often have clients utilize this export, which I’m going to just do this as a teaser because I’m going to speak about this in our next session to reach out to their employees and share, “You have X amount of transactions sitting on your dashboard, please get them coded and submitted within those statement periods.”

This is even to a point where I do provide recommendation for clients that are heavy credit card users to even encourage your users to create a master expense report, title it based upon your statement period, and then submit those all together just to make it easier in terms of the reconciliation period. But those are the key pieces there. Again, I’m going to take a deeper dive here coming up soon in our next session in terms of managing your credit card data.

With that, I am going to go back to our presentation here, and from there, we are going to jump into credit card best practices to keep top of mind once you are live with your card program. So just one second while I do a little bit of a switcheroo here. All right. And now we’re back to our presentation. So best practices to keep top of mind when rolling out a credit card program, or if you have one established, these are still things that are important to reference.

So the number one is define clear guidelines, outlining who is eligible for a corporate card, the spending limits associated with them, which you do have visibility into in TravelBank, as well as any sort of restrictions associated with those card programs. I think training is really key. You never can train too early or too often or over-communicate, especially if you have a really quick turnaround time with reconciliation and needing to send remittance over to your bank. So make sure that all of your employees understand and adhere to these policies.

Managers here on this call, if you’re a manager, you may not love this call out, but I often encourage as a best practice that managers are keepers of the policy. So you need to make sure that you enforce the credit card and expense policy of your direct reports, but also that you’re making sure that they’re submitting timely to make it easier for your finance team to reconcile.

The other piece is set spending limits, especially if you have a tight budget. But you can do that based upon the role, the responsibility, departmental budget, and this prevents overspending, especially on those unauthorized purchases and the fact that you have everything in one place. Visibility into that. You can proactively monitor all of those imported transactions actions, and that, A, will help you detect fraudulent transactions if they come in. But also, if you’re noticing overspending early on, to reach out to those users or managers and share the fact that they need to stay within budget.

Regular reconciliation is another call out I want to make. I recently spoke with a client that said that they had transactions sitting in user dashboards that were over a year old. Really getting on top of those users, ensuring the fact that they’re submitting timely that you’re tying out your credit card transactions imported into TravelBank with those statements, is really important for your financial health and processes. I did touch on this, but it’s important to educate and enforce compliance. So those policies live within TravelBank for a reason. Making sure that people are following the rules is really important.

One piece, as you all know since you’re TravelBank users, is that requiring a receipt, for example, is really important, especially within certain cost thresholds. So thinking about those, maybe even when it comes to credit card receipts, that your users are compliant and in order to save costs, but also reduced risk. The last piece is really a call-out for our live clients. So monitor, evaluate, and update your policy regularly. I encourage you, especially, to do this when you are live, have been live for a while, you have access to a lot of data. It’s okay to need to adjust your policy or build a new policy being armed with the data in order to make informed decisions.

So those are my key best practices to keep top of mind based upon managing your card program here in TravelBank and get into Q&A. So, with that, it looks like I already have a question. Once a card expires, what happens then? So, if a card has expired, your card issuing bank should replace that card. But with that, once the card has expired and your user is issued a new one, once they make a purchase on that new card, those transactions will flow into their… into TravelBank when that card has remained inactive for a 14-day period, meaning that that card number and information is no longer being transmitted in your file or transmitted over to TravelBank, that will roll off of your corporate card list.

However, if you want to be really proactive, feel free to chat into our support team. They can assist you in removing inactive cards if that bothers your view and you want to proactively manage those. Any other questions, feel free to jump in. I’m an open book and happy to answer anything else that comes up here. So I feel like I kind of scratched the surface in how credit cards are… work with TravelBank, how transactions are imported, some best practices, but the part two, the things that we’re going to cover is the real meat and potatoes when it comes to data, right.

So we have the transaction dashboard management. I showed you the dashboard in an initial view of that export, but I want to show you how to proactively manage those transactions that have flowed in and how to use that transaction dashboard. I also am going to take a little trip into the expenses export because clients often do use that even for transaction data, and I can talk a little bit about those key differences between the two. And then ways to use the data to proactively manage reconciliation.

So I have some tips and tricks when it comes to that just in having visibility into where those transactions are and how to proactively manage those. But with that, I want to thank you for participating today for asking thoughtful questions. Again, if you have questions for the success team, feel free to email in at success@travelbank.com. Our support team is also actively available through chat as well as through email, information right here. Again, if you do have those credit card… credit cards that haven’t rolled off your corporate card section, feel free to reach out to them.

And then something that I did want to also encourage you all to check out is TravelBank is constantly innovating. You should also be receiving our release notes from our Head of Product, Dan Skaggs. However, if you’re not, take a look at What’s New, and if you have questions that pop up when you’re reviewing that or want to figure out how to implement those enhancements in your system, feel free to reach out to the success team. We’re here to help you, and I’m glad to jump in and provide recommendations. So, with that, everyone, have a great rest of your week. Thanks so much for taking some time in joining me today.