Businesses that survive are those that bring in more money than they spend.
Money inflow > Money outflow
Money inflow can be revenue from sales – but it can also be an investment for growth companies or grants for non-profits.
Money outflow is the money spent to deliver value to your clients – this can be payroll, production of goods, supplier/vendor payments, team facilitation, meals, travel – you name.
Most companies spend a disproportionate time paying attention to money inflow and too little on outflow. This usually leads to costs spiraling out of control, unaccounted for expenditure, cash flow issues,and stress.
At Xente, we learned the hard way – we use a lot of software as a service (SAAS) products and bill shock put us in a big hole. We did not pay very close attention to monthly postpaid bills (anti we were focused on growth). When the bills arrived months later we had overspent (beyond necessary) by tens of thousands of dollars and in a deep red hole.
Paying attention to spend is hard – it requires spending long tedious hours budgeting and then implementing guard rails to ensure spend is happening within budget.
Many companies fill spend processes with mundane, red tape paper and approval processes that create even more work for their teams leading to less focus on what is important – money inflow.
When we got an opportunity to work with Visa, the largest payment processor in the world - we quickly realized that they’re a lot of businesses that need to manage a company and team spending and that we were in a unique position to solve this problem.
Companies do not only need to manage spending but also free their teams from the red tape processes that are manual, involve a lot of sign here – sign there, cash payments, time consuming and opaque.
With Xente companies can automate spend management such that there able to control and monitor spend in real-time but also give their teams the freedom to spend within budget and policy without stress and headaches.
So how does it work?
Online spend
If you pay for online services (Like we do for cloud, email, etc.) – instead of using a bank card or resellers who can’t help you manage spend, you would pay your online vendor with a Xente Visa card.
We recommend your finance teams create a unique virtual card for each vendor (meaning only a specific vendor can bill the card) and fund the card as per budget.
When the card is billed they will get real-time notifications of spend preventing overcharges and fraud payments. Associated data like receipts can be attached to the payment for easy accountability.
Offline spend
If you spend offline e.g. petty cash, fuel, transport, meals, etc. –
Instead of cash and manual sign here, sign there processes you can issue your team's company Xente Visa cards. You then fund these cards and set policies on how funds can be spent. As funds are spent the finance teams get real-time notifications and reports. Associated data like receipts can be attached to each payment for easy accountability.
We reckon that with Xente, companies will be able to save 2 days of their team times spent hustling with team spend and also save them 10% in real-money terms that could have been lost to leakages, fraud, and over-charges.
Remember, if you cannot manage company spend efficiently, even if you’re getting money efficiently your business could not only not thrive - but die.
