Corporate card Payment Types

[Anonymous User]

I am submitting this on behalf of one of my clients. They would like to know what other large companies are doing as far as the payment method of either corporate or individual liability cards? What are pros/cons of the method they are using? Thanks in advance!

[GrantC]

Hi Laura,

I haven't seen any customers reply yet so I'll jump in with my 2 cents. On the client-facing training team I get to see what a lot of our customers are doing and in my experience the larger customers tend to move towards company-billed / company paid (CBCP) cards. This puts all the liability on the company, but the main pro is it allows them to pay the bill in-full every month and eliminate late fees. The cons are they now have to track users card charges more closely to make sure things are submitted in a timely manner and if the user makes a personal transaction on the card the company is now responsible for tracking and collecting those amounts from the user, which can be a challenge.

Something else to consider, my understanding is CBCP cards tend to offer higher rebates than the other types of cards. This can be a huge benefit for the customer. I have spoken to a number of larger customers where they had enough volume on their CBCP program that the rebate was large enough to cover their annual Concur costs and then some. The way they put it is "as long as we have this volume on our card then Concur is "free" to us." Who doesn't like free, even when it is in quotes?

Thanks,

[Anonymous User]

Thanks Grant. Passing this on to my client. 

[cesnjuli]

Hi,

in my previous project (MNC in 60+ countries with 170k+ users in Concur) we had a mix of different payment types. Preffered global - CBCP, but then due to local legislation/global credit card provider availability in the country we had to implement IBIP and IBCP sometimes. The main reason to implement CBCP was great rebates, however it resulted in more work for accounting department to recconcile it, so you have to consider that when running RFP/building business case. From cash management perspective IBIP or IBCP is much better as well as you don't have to pay it as long as employee have not submitted report, while with CBCP in many cases it takes longer to submit expense report. If your client will opt for CBCP, then make sure he has a process in place to temporary suspend corporate credit cards of employees who are not doing their expenses. That helps to avoid situation where you have thousands of unsubmitted transactions resting in accruals for months (in our case it was years)..We ended up having millions of accruals and huge backlog to clear just because that company decided not to cancel any credit cards for "bad guys"...2 years later with millions in backlog they had to review it and they started cancelling cards if expenses were not submitted for more than 60days.

Anyway feel free to drop me a message privately if you need more info.

And you can find more details here:

https://community.concur.com/t5/Expert-Corner/How-Corporate-Card-Programs-Help-Companies-Reach-Emplo...

[Anonymous User]

Thanks so much for the details. I am sharing with my client. 

[Nancyagfa]

We use IBIP and this forces employees to complete reports for reimbursement and to pay their corp cards. Using CBCP needs more people to review and administer for any personal spend and retrieve that $ from the employees, along with getting reports in a timely manner.  There are only 2 people in my group and manage other functions with Travel/Expense.  We also have a stripped Central Billing for our airfare, so the airfare is charged to the employee's card but stripped off and paid directly to the card account.  We use the Concur expense report to then reconcile the trip.  We require one report per month and also batch every night so employees receive their reimbursement 4 business days after their mgr approves the report. 

Our mtg cards are on an IBCP platform, since these have to be used only for business purposes, and are paid directly, reconciled then within 15 days.

[Anonymous User]

Thanks for your feedback. I am passing it on to my client. 

[neeraj2982]

Hi Nancy

Great points !!!

We are switching from global CBCP cards to local IBCP cards with local currency. Unfortunately, Worldline/Convera does not provide service there currently.

I am looking for pointers how the end to end process would look like involving AMEX Bank/SAP Concur/SAP/System from importing the bank transactions till payment to Amex. Can you provide your thoughts here ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Thanks

Neeraj

[leedau]

@neeraj2982 Thanks for posting in the SAP Concur Community. Here are a few things to consider when switching to IBCP. 

Individually Billed/Company Paid (reimbursement offsets applied)

• When using Individual Bill/Company Paid (IBCP), the individual cardholder (employee) makes the charges on his company card and then adds the charge activity to an expense report.
• The company reimburses the company card vendor based upon all company card charges that the employee submits on expense reports in that payment cycle.
• Reimbursement offsets applied means that if there are any personal expenses or expenses that the approvers reject, the system offsets employee reimbursements with the amount of personal or unapproved expenses.
• This ensures that the company does not overpay for reimbursements to the employee when the employee owes the company for non-reimbursed expenses.

Individually Billed/Company Paid (reimbursement offsets not used)

• Same as the IBCP above, however, without offsets applied.
• When the company card is set up with IBCP reimbursement offsets not used (never pay personal or unapproved amounts), the amount due the card vendor is always the sum of the approved business expenses charged to the card.
• The amounts due to the employee are always the sum of approved cash expenses.
• The employee pays unapproved and personal amounts charged to the card directly to the company card vendor or the company pays it.
• The offsets occur within the company's internal financial system. Financial officers make arrangements (such as payroll deductions) with the employee

Does this help?

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