The current economic environment has heightened focus on procurement activity, with organisations demanding improved control of business expenditure. Purchasing Cards are now common in organisations looking to drive process efficiencies and improve control over low-value, high-volume procurement spend.
Procurement often represents an untapped area of savings for companies. In relation to card payments, the initial focus is often on improving the management of low value but high volume purchases, with potential cost savings achieved from the removal of expensive and manually intensive requisition, payment and reconciliation processes.
Card payments have been frequently identified as a cheap and efficient tool to handle such purchases in order to streamline the Procure-to-Pay cycle, eliminating timely reconciliation and multiple payments.
Benefits for both buyers and suppliers include:
- Creating working capital and cash flow efficiencies: Extend your organisation’s cash management cycle and optimise the use of working capital by extending settlement of purchases via interest free payment periods
- Reduced processing costs: when compared with traditional payment methods (such as invoices, cheques, cash and EFT payments)
- Less paperwork: Reduce the number of invoices which pass through your accounts payable system (particularly for routine purchases), enabling your accounts payable resources to focus on other value added tasks
- Improved reporting information: Transaction data is usually available within 24 hours of a transaction and is sent on a daily basis for total visibility of spend activity. The capture of cost centre and general ledger codes can be automated to allow for easy upload into the finance management system. When data is sent to an Expense Management System (EMS), additional features can also be provided such as spend or category alerts to provide further control. Data is also available online through Westpac’s Corporate Online
- Transaction protection: Offered via Westpac's leading fraud detection system
- Card controls: A range of controls can be applied to reduce card misuse.
When you implement a purchasing card program, a key element is to analyse the existing supplier base and identify your suppliers already accepting card payments. Using proprietary tools, Westpac is able to undertake supplier matching, which provides the foundation for developing the supplier enablement strategy for your company.
Westpac can tailor a Purchasing Card solution that will help manage and control expenses, streamline processes, and deliver savings for your company.