By Talia Mashiach, CEO and founder of Eved
Procurement would love to have you believe that corporate spending is their domain that nothing moves forward without their approval. However, the fact is, established processes often go right out the window as soon as the corporate credit card makes an appearance. And there is no bigger fan of the corporate card than the event teams.
By their very nature, preapprovals and procedures don’t mesh well with events, which tend to be fast paced and lend themselves to spur of the moment decisions. This begs the question then, who is really in charge of corporate spending around events? Is procurement still the boss or does the card reign supreme?
Credit cards
Though widely accepted, credit cards resemble an outdated technology when it comes to corporate spending. Planning and executing an event takes careful attention to detail, especially when it comes to budgeting and reconciliation processes. When event planners depend on credit cards to support their event expenses, they risk many cycles of reconciling the purchases, budget overages and little to no insight.
Procurement
Through different procurement technologies, companies have already installed processes and procedures to track and control the purchase of goods and services to ensure they are always getting the best possible price.
Like the technologies of the past, corporate finance departments are beginning to realize that they need to limit the use of credit cards. Procurement practices have always been the financial standard within organizations, but credit cards threaten to remove that control. Integrating event payment tools into internal business procedures can provide a sense of oversight to your procurement teams and simplify the event management’s job by purchasing from pre-approved, trustworthy vendors.
