Spring is a season known for cleaning, organizing, and refocusing across many different areas of life. Your organization can also benefit by taking a fresh look at your card program controls and certain areas that may need improvement. No matter the size of your card program or the card types used, fresh looks allow organizations to see how effectively each part of their card program is performing and where their program needs improvements. These findings help to ensure the long-term success of your organization’s programs since they focus on continuous process improvements. To help your organization with this process, we created a list below of what to look into.
Fresh Look At Your Card Program Checklist:
Harmful Items That Affect Overall Efficiency
To begin, one area to take a brand new look into is any common purchase that can negatively affect the efficiency of your card program. There are many items that can harm your card program and reduce its overall efficiency. These items include, but are not limited to:
- Duplicate payments across credit cards and invoices
- Fraudulent purchases
- Personal purchases
- Split transactions
- Off-contract purchases
It’s key that you look for how prevalent these items are in your program. This is a great indicator for which areas to start with then taking on process improvements.
Policy Compliance
Next, you may want to shift your focus to policy compliance. An organization’s policies and procedures serve as the backbone for the success of your program since they prohibit any items that can greatly harm a card program.
To take a fresh look into how closely cardholders are following the appropriate policies and procedures, ask yourself these questions:
How many monthly violations are we seeing in cardholders?
Do certain card types have greater violations than others?
When not checked for, noncompliance can bring about disastrous results such as fraud, misuse, and abuse.
Cardholder Training
If the findings in your compliance search reveal any shortcomings, one of the best ways to follow up with this is with cardholder training. Look into the current cardholder training process and see how it can be improved in order to reach compliance.
If you need help with this, CardIntegrity offers custom-built courses that your employees can take online to learn more about your payment methods, preferred suppliers, current policies, and more.
Suppliers and Vendors
Speaking of preferred suppliers, your organization has worked tirelessly for the supplier and vendor relationships you have today. It would be both a waste of time and money if your cardholders didn’t utilize these relationships.
Take a look into how cardholders are utilizing these relationships and how these relationships could be improved.
Current Expense Review Process
Lastly, there are some key areas to look for across your current expense review process as you take a fresh look at your card program. Those include:
- Accountability – Look to see if your current expense process has different individuals assigned to different tasks. These acts of accountability allow your organization to have a specific contact to refer to should a process run into issues.
- Evaluating the findings of your current expense reviews – Are you finding the information you need to make decisions or are there other trends and insights you’d like to see?
- Ongoing reviews and communication – Are there relevant discussions regarding the findings of your expense reports? Are the correct people involved in the follow-up discussions about expense review findings?
A Great Start to Following Up With the Findings Of Your Fresh Looks
After the work of setting up your card program, there is even more work required to take fresh looks into different areas of your card program controls so improvements can be made.
The solutions and financial specialists at Card Integrity can provide the exact fresh looks your program requires and can follow up on the items revealed from each of these looks. We provide:
- Consistent reviews and communication regarding all key findings of all expense reports
- Customized reports for each organization so that you only see the alerts, numbers, and trends that are most relevant to your role
- Specific reports and analytics on the key alerts, trends, and findings to allow organizations to make real change
- Direction to help you determine what information you need on the spend, and what trends we need to monitor for
If your organization would like to see any of the above items in action, sign-up for an online demonstration today.
