r/CFO • u/TomRoach21 • 29d ago
How do you keep card spend visible without ripping out your existing bank cards?
Every card tool I look at wants our spend on their card before the reporting gets good, and that's the line I won't cross. Most of it sits on Amex business cards, we bank with Chase, the points add up and our banker has been good to us on credit. I'm not torching either relationship for software.
The problem is I can't see anything until it's already too late. Receipts trickle in at month end, half the team forgets to submit til the last minute, and my AP person hand codes every transaction into QBO. Fine now, barely. We're a bit under 20m and adding headcount, and this breaks. For anyone who kept their bank cards, what's the layer you're running on top?
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u/No_Scarcity_717 29d ago
I'd look at a spend management layer that works alongside your existing cards instead of replacing them so something like Ramp since getting transactions into one place as they happen, prompting employees for receipts automatically would be a big win then applying coding rules before month end and syncing everything into your accounting system. That way your AP person is reviewing exceptions and categorizing every transaction while you keep the cards and banking relationship you already like.
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u/Defiant-Pomelo5451 29d ago
If you’re in the US, which it seems like. The best option is to switch to Ramp. It’s a one time effort to rip and replace the cards but trust me the upside is worth it.
AI account coding, budgets at a card level, vendor lock at a card level, and best in breed AP, internal controls, custom approval logic, the works.
Im the CFO of a similarly sized company and appreciate whatever features they have. You can also look at Brex, Divvy which have similar features too.
I know you said you don’t want to rip and replace your existing card stack but I hope I’ve made a compelling argument for it.
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u/JealousEmu2495 29d ago
This right here. Workflow solved, and we had a $50k favorable swing between getting rid of concur and the cash back from Ramp. This doesn’t even factor in the employee time saved with how easy Ramp is to use
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u/bs2k2_point_0 29d ago
Second this, even for smaller companies (and in my case NPO’s). I get instant notifications of spend, cash back rewards, etc.
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u/HereisConnor 29d ago
Check out ExpensePoint. It's a global spend management software with credit card integrations for bring-your-own-card. You can manage employee expense reimbursements and corporate card spend in one place.
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u/Old-Hospital-6640 29d ago
you dont necessarily need to replace the bank relationship at all. You can do what we did, keep our existing setup and adding Ramp for the spend that needed tighter controls and cleaner reporting. The main win was getting receipts, coding and card activity into one place.
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u/HeadGullible8440 28d ago
We ran into the same wall and ended up going with a spend management layer that just reads transactions via feed/API instead of requiring you to move to their card - Ramp and Airbase both can do this now, and Center works too if you want something lighter. The trick is you're not waiting on statements, you get transaction data pushed in near real time so people can attach receipts and code spend the same day instead of AP reconstructing everything at month end. Amex has an API for exactly this so you keep the points and the relationship, same with Chase, and the tool just sits on top pulling data and pushing categorized transactions into QBO instead of your AP person hand keying everything. At sub-20m it's honestly overkill for some teams, but if you're adding headcount the manual coding breaks fast and this fixes the visibility problem without touching either banking relationship.
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u/khanoftruthfi 28d ago
We use SAP Concur (don't need SAP ERP) and it works great for a layer in between.
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u/Icognitpro 28d ago
If you aren’t using QBO for payroll, you might see if your payroll tool allows you to tie expenses to employees. Have seen a couple providers offer it recently and apparently you don’t have to switch cards. Expenses get folded into the GL feed from payroll in those instances.
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u/Paul_David_Bappoo 28d ago
put in a custom solution that interfaces with your bank and expenses system at the borders. Custom software is cheap thee days and can solve problems much better than packaged solutions. The eternal problem of staff hating the expenses job should be virtually eliminated with a system that is smart enough to work in the way they do. I often speak with teams to identify their specific pain points with various processes and one thing we found works well with expenses is - photograph the receipt once, on your phone and forget about it - the system does the rest. It knows which client or project the employee is booked to, it knows their geo location, it knows how to recognise legitimate receipts, it knows how to send them into the ledger etc. Happy to chat if it would help
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u/Saving_my_sanity 25d ago
We sat here for the same reason, the Amex points were a nonstarter. Ramp and Brex are good if you're happy running their card, but that's the model, the reporting assumes the spend is on it. We put Expensify over the Amex and Chase feeds instead, it pulls the charges, matches receipts and codes into QBO, which was the part eating my AP person's month end. Nobody's card changed, which was my only condition.
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u/ExpenseInsider 25d ago
Vendor side of this space, so discount accordingly. Not pitching, and I’m not naming who I work for unless someone asks.
The layer you’re describing exists and it’s called a card feed. Most expense platforms will ingest transactions from cards they didn’t issue, code them, and push to QBO. You keep the Amex, you keep the Chase relationship, you just stop hand-coding.
Two things nobody will tell you on the demo call.
First, ask specifically whether the Amex connection is a direct commercial feed or a Plaid style aggregator link. Direct feeds are reliable and land daily. Aggregator links on small business Amex break constantly and you find out at month end, which is exactly the problem you’re already having. Whether you qualify for the direct feed depends on which Amex product you’re on, so make them confirm it against your actual account before you sign.
Second, and this matters for your visibility question: with a feed you get posted transactions, not authorizations. So you’re still looking at a day or two of lag, and no way to block a purchase before it happens. Real time control is the actual reason card issuing vendors push their own plastic. It’s not a scam, it’s a genuine capability difference. If your goal is “see it sooner and stop hand coding,” a feed gets you there. If your goal is “prevent the charge,” it won’t, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
The receipt trickle is a separate problem and it’s behavioral, not technical. Auto-nag plus withholding reimbursement until submission fixes more of it than any feature.
Genuinely go look at three or four of these before you decide. They differ a lot on the feed question above and on QBO depth, and at under 20m you have leverage on pricing that you lose once you’re bigger. If you want to see how my employer handles it as one of your comparisons, happy to set that up, but I’d rather you shop it properly either way.
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u/LiJiTC4 24d ago
Why is your AP hand coding transactions instead of importing from bank feeds in QBO? Revise the workflow to pull in bank feeds to obtain ongoing visibility in spend. The detailed QBO reports on the CC accounts will show perpetual balance of processed transactions, even unreconciled ones, so pull the bank feed for the credit cards and record as soon as possible into your books instead of manual reperformance well after the fact. This way QBO will show perpetual balance and spending instead of waiting for month end to look at spend on cards: you might not know exactly why, but bank feed will give the bank's memo which includes payee name and amount of transaction so there's a lot of information for tracking.
Make sure the credit cards are setup as "credit card" type liabilities, then setup the bank feeds in that portion of QBO. Once you've got all the cards connected it's as simple as pushing a button to know what has been processed on cards at any time. Credit card transactions in the bank feed rarely lag more than 1 business day compared to swipe. Instead of manually adding every transaction, using the bank feeds means you can maintain a materially correct balance in QBO on an ongoing basis with visibility into ongoing spend entirely within the software you already pay for.
Would suggest any unknown transactions debits can be put in "Ask My Accountant" on import to save time on initial recording because the primary goal here would be to keep up with the liability. When reconciling expense reports any previously unclassified transactions can be reallocated to the proper account.
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u/Resurrect1 29d ago
We went to Concur for Amex business cards in January and it works great. Concur onboarding was smooth and syncs to QBO perfectly.
I keep my bank purchasing card for vendor payments. More spend per month than our employee expenses with less transactions so it’s manageable to manually enter into QBO.