How to Manage Spending from Anywhere and Supercharge Remote Teams

Working remotely has many business advantages. Remote workers are happier, more loyal, and more productive. And ditching the office can also significantly slash your overhead — a 2013 study pegged the savings at a whopping £34 billion.

The flipside is that, with everyone working from wherever, it’s harder to distribute money and track and control your teams’ spending. Which is where Soldo comes in handy.

Recently, we ran a webinar in which we demonstrated how easy our platform makes it to manage spending from anywhere.

Here’s a quick roundup of the features that make this possible.

Transfer money instantly with virtual cards

The biggest challenge of managing remote teams’ spending is that they’re, well, remote. Short of teleportation, sending your teams money will involve mailing cash, a cheque, or a card in the post.

This creates three problems. It’s:

• Slow — mail takes at least one working day to arrive
• Costly — First Class stamps start at 76p each. Multiply that by however many staff members you have, then make it a recurring cost
• Unsafe — leaving aside the risk of theft, the mail could get contaminated with the Covid-19 coronavirus, putting your staff at unnecessary risk

Enter virtual cards.

These are exactly like physical prepaid cards, except that they live in the cloud. You can create as many as you need in the Soldo dashboard and top them up instantly through your main Soldo wallet.

Even better, virtual cards can be:

• Individual — these can only be used by the team member whose name is on the card
• Departmental — for example, you can create a card specifically for your sales department to share
• Project-specific — Have several departments working on a project together? Project-based cards allow staff working on that project to pull from the same company card (where you can ring-fence money for a specific purpose)

Manage individual, departmental, and project budgets with ease

Of course, prepaid cards — whether physical or virtual — have to be topped up. And Soldo’s platform not only makes this super-simple, it also gives you the tools you need to make sure you stay in control.

The key is your main wallet, where you deposit money from your business bank account.

You can transfer money to your main wallet instantly with BACS, CHAPS, or Faster Payments. Once the money’s in, you can distribute it in three different ways:

• Load individual cards

You can top up each card with a different amount. So your Head of Marketing could get £5,000, for instance, while a procurement junior could get £500

• Create a company card — or several — for each of your departments

You could create a company wallet for your sales team’s overall budget, for example, and company cards for specific projects they’re working on.

You can connect any number of virtual cards to each company wallet so anyone on a team can use them.

• Create company cards for special projects

Here again, you can connect as many virtual cards to each company wallet as you need to, and either assign them to specific team members or use a unique identifier

You can top up cards manually, set up regular payments — for example on a specific day of the month — or even trigger top-ups when balances go under a certain amount. This is especially handy should a team member need emergency money, for example because they’re away from home.

You can also set limits and restrict certain types of purchases. Soldo automatically blocks payments when someone goes over the limit or tries to buy something you’ve restricted. Which means you don’t have to spend time policing your staff.

Get a real-time snapshot of your organisation’s online spending

Making money available to your teams quickly and setting spending controls is all well and good. But, at the end of the day, you also need to understand how you’re spending, so you can budget accurately and make better financial decisions.

Well, Soldo makes this easy breezy too.

Every virtual card transaction is recorded and logged on the dashboard in real time, so you don’t have to wait for expense reports or card statements to do your reconciliations.  Soldo also categorises transactions automatically by user, merchant, expense category, company card, or even by custom accounting or nominal code.

The upshot is that you can see who has spent, how much, and on what at any time, and the data is all organised the way you like it. Team members can also download an app and upload receipts. Which means you won’t have to waste time matching receipts to transactions and doing financial detective work.

Remote working is the new normal. Embrace it, with Soldo

While remote working was already fairly common in the UK — 45% of office workers worked from home at least once a week pre-Covid-19 — the pandemic and ensuing lockdown have made it all the more common.

More to the point, British workers have embraced it. So while your staff probably can’t wait for lockdown to end, you may have a hard time coaxing them back to the office full-time.

Luckily, remote working doesn’t mean giving up control over your organisation’s spending. With Soldo, you can quickly give your teams the funds they need to do their best work, without handing them the keys to the castle.

Want more in-depth info about Soldo’s features and how it can help you supercharge your remote teams?

Watch the full webinar and demo