Extend Launches ‘Team Budgets’ to Improve Spend Management

Virtual card/spend management platform Extend has debuted a feature dubbed “team budgets.”

The new offering, announced Wednesday (March 27), is designed to help its customers organize and control spending by letting employees send and manage secure virtual cards.

“With the rollout of team budgets, those customers gain an even easier way to eliminate risky card-sharing behavior and achieve more with their preferred card programs,” the company said in a news release.

Extend said that workers often need to access company cards to make payments, while vendors might need to keep a card number on file. However, sharing company credit cards among multiple people creates risk, while using personal cards generates inefficiencies.

“By provisioning budgets to team members, finance leaders can enable teams to create secure virtual cards on-demand for business expenses, while keeping spend organized and under their purview, thus protecting against fraud and administrative burden,” Extend said. “Budget owners can also securely share administrative access and management responsibility to other users, so business won’t stop when the cardholder is on vacation or overloaded with other tasks.”

The launch of Extend’s new offering follows a year in which data-informed spend management controls — including the rising use of virtual cards — helped bring transparency and oversight to the spend management field.

“After all, given the challenges of today’s shifting macro environment and the fact they are unlikely to abate in the New Year, finance teams no longer have the luxury of taking company spend at face value — and instead are turning over every available rock to cut costs and unlock capital,” PYMNTS wrote in the December report.

Businesses relying on manual or entrenched spend management processes are now finding themselves increasingly vulnerable compared to peers who have more fully embraced digital spend programs and virtual cards.

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that virtual cards and digital spend management tools can help finance departments close their books faster while safeguarding against fraud.

Companies that aren’t using virtual cards will be the ones that fall behind, Bob Kaufman, founder and CEO of ConnexPay, told PYMNTS in an interview earlier this month.

“The suppliers that are not as flexible and willing to embrace these new forms of payments are going to lose business, while the buyers who are not using them are losing revenue, which results in them not being as competitive in their space,” he said.

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