Vendor cards: How to manage recurring payments with Pleo

 Does your business have a Zoom licence or Slack subscription? Maybe you send emails through Hubspot or Salesforce? Pleo Vendor cards offer a simple way to manage your recurring payments and digital spending, clearly separating them from employee expenses.

This is your guide to understanding how Vendor cards can work for your business, saving you time and money when managing the digital services you rely on every day.

Key takeaways:

• Vendor cards are virtual cards designed for managing recurring online payments and vendor subscriptions whilst keeping them separate from employee expenses.
• Each vendor card can be assigned to a specific person responsible for a vendor payment – like AWS or LinkedIn ads – for clear ownership and control.
• With vendor cards, you can set spend limits, streamline cash flow management and avoid messy bookkeeping. It’s clean, controlled and hassle-free.

What is a Vendor card?

Pleo Vendor cards are virtual cards designed to make managing recurring online payments and vendor subscriptions smooth sailing.

Vendor cards give your finance team better control over recurring payments by assigning a unique virtual card to the person in charge of each payment. Essentially, they help create separation between employee and supplier spend for better control over your cash.

For example, let’s say your colleague in marketing is responsible for LinkedIn paid ads, and someone in your IT department takes care of paying for AWS. As an admin, you can assign them each a virtual Vendor card exclusively to these payments.

Automate the payment, set the right spending limit and make sure you never go over budget – just set and forget!

Here are two occasions when you may want to use a Vendor card:

• When you’re paying fixed monthly or yearly software subscriptions to one vendor – e.g. Figma.
• When you’re paying varying amounts to the same vendor over a period of time – e.g. AWS.

Just bear in mind that for employee expenses like meals and train tickets, you should continue to use your plastic or virtual Pleo cards.

How do Vendor cards differ from regular Pleo cards?

Whilst both Pleo Vendor cards and regular Pleo cards help you manage expenses, they serve different purposes. Here’s a quick breakdown of their differences and when you’d use each one:

Regular Pleo cards	Pleo Vendor cards
Issued to the individual employee for businesses expenses like travel, meals and office supplies	Issued to the company (but assigned an individual owner) for recurring vendor or subscription payments
Can be physical or virtual	Virtual-only
Used for one-off or day-to-day expenses	Typically used for ongoing, vendor-specific payments
Employees manage their own transactions	Finance or admin team manages Vendor card usage

Why do you need a Vendor card?

We’ve designed Vendor cards to give finance and procurement much-needed control over cash flow, as well as visibility over subscriptions and digital services.

How? By centralising and limiting payments to one or a group of vendors. No more client lunches getting mixed in with your monthly Notion subscription and creating confusion in the books.

Vendor cards are the best way to streamline your outgoings, helping you:

• Save money by getting rid of pesky duplicate subscriptions you didn't know about, and providing a comprehensive overview of all recurring spend. Knowledge is power, so the more you know, the better equipped you’ll be to make positive changes.
• Save hassle thanks to simplified spend management. Need to adjust the spending limit or change the cardholder name when an employee leaves? Want to pause a subscription whilst you weigh up your options? It’s all doable at the tap of a button in the Pleo app.
• Save time by centralising your most frequent payments. From payment to bookkeeping, everything is visible in real-time, and you can bank on accurate cost allocation across departments and cost centres.

But those aren’t the only benefits you get from Vendor cards. Here are some of the other features you can look forward to:

Paying in different currencies

If a payment is in a different currency, you have the option of setting a specific currency limit on that card.

For example, if your Marketing subscriptions are paid in GBP but your Wallet is set to EUR, you can simply set a GBP limit on the Marketing Vendor card. The funds will still be pulled from your wallet but will be converted to EUR before being deducted.

These amounts are also automatically adjusted for foreign currency exchanges to maintain accuracy between your wallet and currency limits. It’s that simple.

People change, but Vendor cards don’t have to

We get it – people move on, and no one wants the added hassle of cancelling subscriptions. With Pleo Vendor cards, you don’t have to.

Cards can be easily reassigned to new owners. If an employee leaves you can simply change the card owner. Neat, right?

Who can get a Vendor card?

Anyone who wants one! Anyone on a Pleo Advanced plan, that is.

You can have one card per vendor, or load multiple vendors onto the same card, and your business can have as many Vendor cards as you like. Adjust the card limits to weekly, monthly and by amount to ensure full control and limit the payment to one or a group of suppliers.

Take control of your business spend with Pleo Vendor cards

Ready to get set up with a Vendor card and take control of your spend management? Log into the Pleo web app, select ‘Vendor cards’ on the left hand side and enter all the necessary fields. Select the card owner, card limit and the amount. That’s it – you’re all set.

For more information on how Vendor cards work, check out our Help article.