Mastering spend management: Easily manage recurring payments with Pleo’s Vendor cards

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.

What is a Vendor card? 

Pleo Vendor cards allow your finance team to have better control over recurring payments by assigning a unique virtual card to the person in charge of each payment. They provide a separation between employee and supplier spend for better control. 

Let's say your colleague in marketing looks after LinkedIn paid ads. And someone in your IT department is responsible for paying for AWS. As an admin, you can now assign them each a virtual Vendor card exclusively for 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, such as Figma. 
• When you’re paying varying amounts to the same vendor over a period of time, like AWS.

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

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.

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.

But that’s not all. 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 change the cardholder name when an employee leaves or adjust the spending limit? Want to pause a subscription while 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. 

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, so if an employee leaves you can simply change the card owner.

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. 

Ready to get set up with a Vendor card? 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.