Float modernizes expense management for Canadian businesses

Imagine: it’s month end, and suddenly you’re faced with a mountain of expense reports to review and approve. You know that you’re in for a lot of chasing people down for receipts, reviewing expenses, and reconciling the books – often having to individually review, code, and assign expenses. Perhaps you’re a marketing leader, and your team members need to increase performance marketing spend ASAP – but you’re out of the office and aren’t comfortable dropping your corporate credit card information into a chat.

Or, if you’re like Float co-founders Rob Khazzam, Griffin Keglevich, and Ruslan Nikolaev, the reason for building this new spend management solution could be as simple as realizing that you’re carrying thousands of dollars of corporate expenses on your personal credit cards, scrambling to find the receipts for these charges at month end, and waiting as long as 60 to 90 days to be reimbursed.

What is Float?

Toronto-based Float is Canada’s first smart corporate card and spend-management software, built to simplify business spending for companies and teams. It offers the ability to manage, control, automate, and scale corporate spending – all within a single platform.

For organizations, this offers numerous benefits, especially as they’re continuing to scale and grow, adding complexity and increasingly large volumes of transactions per month.

To start, the application process for traditional corporate credit cards is often tedious and lengthy, and typically constrains companies to issuing only a few cards to select individuals, and to spending limits that may cap company growth. With Float, companies are able to be approved with higher limits than a traditional corporate card because the card limits are linked to the company’s bank balances, not to an arbitrary set of rules. And with a simple five-minute application, you can be approved within days, not weeks, so you can start spending almost immediately.

According to Rhianna Brancato, director of finance at Properly, this scalability was her initial reason for considering Float. “As a startup, our credit card limit was low and our spend policies were essentially non-existent. What we had wasn’t scaleable and Float turned it all around.”

Manage corporate card spend with a click of a button

With Float, companies are able to issue physical and virtual corporate cards to any employee, while still keeping relevant controls around spend limits and approvals. With this type of flexibility, team members will no longer need to use their personal credit cards for day-to-day expenses (always a risk when it comes to trying to control corporate spending). Not only that, each vendor expense can be managed by assigning GL codes, spend limits, and more – right in the platform.

There are also no limits to the number of virtual cards that can be issued. Float customers have the flexibility to issue cards to vendors and internal teams, controlling spend limits and the rules around processing expenses. This ensures vendors get paid, no matter if the person who holds the traditional corporate card is out of the office, and eliminates the possibility of service disruptions while needing to wait for a traditional credit card transaction to be approved.

This feature was incredibly useful to many clients during the pandemic. As teams moved to asynchronous working hours and companies were scrambling to keep up with everyday business expenses – reimbursing employees for home office setup expenses, mental health supports, and benefits – being able to issue virtual credit cards with pre-defined spending limits was incredibly helpful.

Saying goodbye to painful month-end reconciliation

Organizations appreciate that beyond spend controls, Float also eliminates the dreaded monthly expense reporting frenzy. It has end-to-end approval on spending; the ability to place limits on each corporate card as needed; and automated receipt collection that not only reminds individuals to submit their receipts, but allows teams to lock the cards of individuals who haven’t done so. The best part? Receipts are automatically matched and coded based on defined rules.

This was important to Jerry Lin, VP of finance at Coinberry, when the company considered making a move from a traditional corporate card structure to Float. “Using Float, our bookkeeper can track expenses throughout the month instead of waiting for employees to submit their receipts at the last minute. By the time month-end comes along, 80 percent of the work is already done.”

As companies grow, that seamless management grows too – Float’s single-spend management platform continues to work hard – providing you with end-to-end oversight, virtual corporate card management, and the ability to set your own chains of approval and rules around spending.

According to Heather Brunt, finance controller with Nerva, the platform’s ability to do all that is huge. “We have hundreds and hundreds of transactions a month, which is why this platform is so huge for us. To go through that many receipts would be impossible,” she says.

To learn more about Float or book a demo, visit Floatcard.com.