Commercial Cards

By and large, one of the biggest problems for the modern enterprise is managing expenses. Enterprises that manage expenses well find cost savings and return money to the organization’s coffers. Those that manage expenses poorly end up spending more capital than is advisable. One of the most efficient ways to manage an enterprise’s budget is [...]

We’ve had a fair number of good articles in the past few weeks here at Payables Place; there was an insightful Telecom Expense Management article, the first few articles in Chris Dwyer’s Spring Training series, and even a nice piece on Declining Balance Cards (but I’m biased on that one). So, without further ado, here’s [...]

The declining balance card is unique among commercial card products. Combining aspects of both a purchasing card and a prepaid card, the declining balance card has multiple applications when it comes to managing enterprise spend as part of a commercial card program. Three such applications have already been outlined, such as infrequent employee travel and [...]

Business travel is a growing concern for the modern enterprise. Whether it’s saving on the cost of airline tickets, or trying to keep traveling employees in compliance with corporate policies, managing business travel expenses can be a massive headache. That’s why the corporate travel card can be so valuable to the typical enterprise. Read on [...]

Not even two full weeks have passed in 2015, and already big news has arisen around the accounts payable and working capital worlds. From the Federal Reserve declaring they wouldn’t yet raise interest rates in the U.S., to Russia finding itself forced to seek out alternatives to Visa and MasterCard. It’s looking like this year [...]

Happy Halloween! Did you know that the New York Halloween Parade in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village is the only major night-time parade in the United States? It also turns 40 years old today, so happy birthday to those ghouls and goblins. Americans spent around $1.9 billion on candy for Halloween 2013, which sounds like a lot [...]

For more than 70 years, enterprises of all sizes have used commercial payment cards to purchase everything from airline tickets to office supplies. This flexibility has led solution providers to launch numerous card products in the intervening decades. Today, there are cards to manage corporate travel, cards for purchasing, fleet cards for transportation, ghost cards [...]

The last phase of the AP process is the scheduling, processing and execution of an invoice payment. In the US, paper checks are still dominant as a payment format; however, this is shifting rapidly. The migration from paper checks to electronic payments (e.g., ACH, card, wire transfer, etc.) is a trend that is only going [...]

In order to continue to provide valuable and insightful content, we decided this year to include articles from other experts in the field on occasion. Today, we have an article from our first “Payables Guest” – Mark Becker, Program Optimization Manager at U.S. Bank Corporate Payment Systems. Most organizations have specific reasons for starting purchasing [...]

Following the most recent addition to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) ePayables offering, I had a chance to have a chat with Samridhi Sarin, Director, Senior Product Manager of ePayables at BAML. The announcement was the launch of a new feature called exact auth override. This feature, which may sound technical and complicated, [...]