Taking on the world of traditional corporate cards and spend management, Float is the first Canadian company to bring a smart, high-limit corporate card to small to mid-sized businesses to qualify for higher credit limits and seamlessly manage expenses.

Imagine: it’s month-end and suddenly you’re faced with a mountain of expense reports to review and approve. You know that you’ll be chasing people down for receipts, reviewing expenses, and reconciling the books —often having to individually review, code, and assign expenses.

Or, you’re a marketing manager, and your team members need to increase paid ad spend ASAP. But you’re out of the office and aren’t comfortable dropping your corporate card information into a Slack message.

Or, if you’re like Float co-founders Rob Khazzam, Griffin Keglevich, and Ruslan Nikolaev, you’re carrying thousands of dollars of corporate expenses on your personal credit cards, and you’re scrambling to find the receipts for these charges; often waiting as many as 90 days to be reimbursed.

Those are just a few of the many scenarios that prompted the co-founders to launch Float.

What is Float?

Toronto-based Float is Canada’s first smart corporate card and spend management software built to simplify business spending for companies and teams. It offers the ability to manage, control, automate, and scale corporate spending — all within a single platform.

For starters, the application process for traditional business credit cards is often tedious and lengthy, and typically constrains companies to issuing only a few cards to select individuals, and to spending limits that may also limit company growth. 

With Float, companies are able to be approved with higher limits than a traditional corporate card would offer. This is because the card limits are linked to the company’s bank balances. And with a simple five-minute application, you can be approved within days, not weeks. So, you can start spending almost immediately. Virtual Float corporate cards can also be used anywhere VISA is accepted. 

Why tech companies like Properly, Nerva, and Coinberry use Float

According to Rhianna Brancato of Properly, this scalability was their initial reason for considering Float. “As a startup, our credit card limit was low and our spend policies were essentially non-existent,” Brancato says ``What we had wasn’t scaleable and Float turned it all around.”

With Float, companies are able to issue physical or virtual cards to any individual on their team. With this type of flexibility, team members will no longer need to use their personal credit cards for day-to-day expenses — always a risk when it comes to trying to control corporate spending. Not only that, each vendor expense can be managed by assigning GL codes, spend limits, and more right on the platform.

There are also no limits to the number of virtual cards that can be issued. Float clients have the flexibility to issue cards to vendors and internal teams, controlling spend limits and the rules around processing expenses. This ensures vendors get paid, no matter if the person who holds the traditional corporate card is out of the office, and eliminates the possibility of service disruptions while needing to wait for a traditional credit card transaction to be approved.

This feature was incredibly useful to many clients during the pandemic. As teams moved to asynchronous working hours, and companies were scrambling to keep up with everyday business expenses, reimbursing employees for home office setup expenses, mental health supports, and benefits, being able to issue virtual credit cards with pre-defined spending limits was incredibly helpful.

Organizations typically appreciate that beyond spend controls, Float also eliminated the dreaded monthly expense reporting frenzy. With end-to-end approval on spending, the ability to place limits on each virtual corporate card as needed, and automated receipt collection that not only automatically reminds individuals to submit their receipts, it also allows teams to lock the cards of individuals who haven’t done so. The best part? Receipts are automatically matched and coded based on defined rules.

This was important to Jerry Lin, VP of finance at Coinberry as they considered making a move from a traditional corporate card structure to Float. “Using Float, our bookkeeper can track expenses throughout the month instead of waiting for employees to submit their receipts at the last minute,” Lin says. “By the time month-end comes along, 80% of the work is already done.”

As companies grow, its seamless management grows, too. That single spend management platform continues to work hard — providing you with end-to-end oversight, virtual corporate card management, and the ability to set your own chains of approval and rules around spending.

According to Heather Brunt, Finance Controller with Nerva, the platform’s ability to do all of the above is huge. “We have hundreds and hundreds of transactions a month, which is why this platform is so huge for us,” Brunt says. “To go through that many receipts would be impossible.” 

Finally, it’s all about the fees. With Float, your organization won’t incur FX fees. You can spend comfortably anywhere with no additional fees — while earning one percent cash back (and other perks).

Companies of any size can benefit from Float’s offering, but it’s often small to mid-sized businesses (between 20 and 500 employees) that could see the best outcomes, especially since those long approval times, and relatively low credit extensions when applying for traditional business credit cards, exist. 

To book your demo, or learn more, visit FloatCard.com. Get $500 cashback on your first $2,500 in spend using code VANTECHJOURNAL500.

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