Spend Management For Remote Employees: Try Jeeves

If you’re managing remote teams, you might be experiencing these problems:

• Processing payments and accounting for remote employee business expenses between countries is time consuming and hard to control
• Cross-border payments are expensive and can affect your bottom line
• A lack of remote spending visibility increases your risk of overspending, fraud, and setting unrealistic budgets

With Jeeves, you can solve these challenges and get remote employee and team spending under control.

In this article, we cover:

• Why remote expense management is challenging
• Why current remote employee spend management solutions don’t work
• How Jeeves solves spend management for remote employees

Looking for a remote employee spend management solution with an attached credit card account? Try Jeeves.

Why your remote expense management is challenging

When you try to manage remote employee spending, you're probably struggling with four main problems:

1. Tracking and accounting for remote employee spending is difficult because it’s dispersive 

Gathering information from so many different sources takes time and makes your accounting workflows difficult. 

Not all remote employee payment methods (like prepaid or debit corporate cards) have online spend management tools. 

If you ask employees to use their own personal credit or debit cards, you’re going to have to process expense claims and reimburse expenses in multiple foreign currencies for anyone based abroad. And processing remote employees’ expenses and reimbursements one by one can take a long time.  

2. Lack of visibility leads to frequent overspending 

Overspends are common because you can’t spot remote expenses in real-time and you don't have full visibility over individual expenditures until the end of the month (sometimes even later).

For example, if you’re using company debit and credit cards, you often don't have online dashboards or accounting software integrations to see who’s spending what. For employee business credit cards, you have to wait until month-end to receive paper statements for a complete overview or make do by constantly checking over e-statements until their fully updated.

If you’re using shared credit cards, you’ll struggle to see who paid for what because there’s no traceable accountability.

3. Remote spending inhibits cash flow

Most remote spending solutions force you to keep cash in your bank account to meet debit card spending or add money to prepaid cards. But this reduces your cash flow and makes it difficult to act on a business opportunity or just pay your bills.

Forex fees and additional transfer fees can also significantly impact your profitability and cash flow.

4. Dealing with foreign remote spending is complex, costly and time consuming 

Cross-border payments are subject to delays whether reimbursing remote employees' expenses or transferring cash to overseas accounts. 

If you have overseas bank accounts and prepaid card accounts, it also takes time and costs money to convert cash into the currencies you need to make transfers to these accounts

When employees pay with their own credit cards, you don’t get any cash back, rewards or incentives from it. And fluctuating exchange rates can either be beneficial or costly to you or your remote employee when reimbursing them on purchases made with personal cards. 

Why current remote employee spend solutions don’t work 

Traditional spend management and remote employee payment solutions don’t fully resolve the challenges of remote employee spending and are costly. You often have to pay for access to expense management software. You may also pay monthly charges to use these tools and extra costs for each card you’ve issued.

Let’s look at the five ways companies manage their remote employee expense and how each one falls short of being a complete solution.  

1. Personal credit cards. Remote workers use their personal cards, fill out and send you an expense report, which you’ll have to process and reimburse later. With this solution, you’ll have to deal with record-keeping delays, chasing after missing receipts, and paying foreign exchange fees when remote employees are overseas.
2. Shared company cards. When you have a handful of credit cards in the company, you’ll share the card details with remote staff so they can make online payments quickly. This method can leave you open to security risks, fraud, and lack of accountability.
3. Individual company debit cards. Business debit cards take money out of your business bank account straight away, which can limit your cash flow and undermine business growth.
4. Individual company prepaid cards. You need to take money out of your current account each month to top up remote colleagues' prepaid cards. Like company debit cards, this affects your cash flow. Prepaid cards also mean your finance teams will have to constantly forecast remote employee spending needs and spend additional time topping up cards halfway through the month.
5. Individual company credit cards. You’ll get visibility on what colleagues are spending with employee business credit cards because they connect to an overall company credit balance and limit. However, if your business cards are not part of a complete expense management software or tool, you’ll have to manually re-type every entry and tag every receipt in your accounting program. Issuing business credit cards for each remote employee is also expensive. 

Solve your remote employee expense management with Jeeves

Jeeves offers company credit cards, but with a major difference. 

In addition to providing physical and virtual business credit cards for remote workers, we also give you an online dashboard and spend management platform, all connected to one account.

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Jeeves directly addresses the challenges of remote workforce spending thanks to:

• One centralised account, bringing together all remote employee spending for complete global expense management.
• Access to credit. Paying by debit card or prepaid card requires money upfront. Jeeves is a credit card so you don’t need money in your bank account to cover a transaction.
• Individual cards for each remote employee. You can stop relying on remote employees’ creditworthiness. With Jeeves, you can create physical and virtual cards, add funds, set spending limits and track employee spending for remote staff in real time online, all through the Jeeves dashboard.  
• One bill to pay each month in your own currency regardless of which country or currency your employees made purchases.
• Integration with Xero and QuickBooks makes running employee and cost category expense reports simple and quick.
• In-app receipt capture and attachment. Staff can take pictures of receipts and associate them with individual transactions, saving both you and remote staff time.

Let’s take an in-depth look at how you can use Jeeves to manage your remote employee spending, no matter their number or location. 

‍Already convinced? Apply to Jeeves now for an all-in-one solution to your spend management for in house and remote employees.

Use one centralised system no matter where your remote teams are

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You can manage all your remote employee spending from one single Jeeves account rather than dealing with multiple domestic and foreign bank accounts, debit cards, prepaid cards and company credit cards. 

You’ll have a complete spend management tool linked to a main credit account where you can create unlimited physical and virtual credit cards.  

With Jeeves, you can:

• Monitor remote business spending live from a centralised account. With the Jeeves dashboard, you can see remote spending in real time, wherever in the world it takes place.

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• Receive up-to-date supporting data in one place. Remote staff can capture and attach expense receipts with a click, saving you time and making your financial records more complete. Employees can also add notes to receipts to clarify and account for their transactions. You can even filter employee transactions by missing receipts, so you can quickly follow up and close your accounting periods on time.

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• Settle one payment, once a month. You can avoid topping up multiple prepaid cards or reimbursing several expense reports per month. With Jeeves, you just pay one bill a month, saving time and simplifying your accounting.
• See real-time and historical data in one place. See each remote employee’s spend in the month in real-time on the dashboard as well as their historical spending. If a member of staff regularly exceeds their budget, you can work with them to resolve this and reduce their monthly spending limit temporarily.
• Manage all remote staff expenses with one tool. You can issue cards, add funds and set spending limits for each remote employee, all from the Jeeves dashboard. Easily monitor each employee card with a click whenever you want. You can also download transactions by employee card and do away with expense reports and expense reimbursements for good. 
• Integrate existing software. Jeeves also provides QuickBooks and Xero integration so you can sync all remote employee transactions daily with your accounting software.

Try a spend management platform designed for remote employees and global growth. Apply to Jeeves today.

Choose multi-currency credit

We built Jeeves as a multi-currency solution for international businesses. You can receive credit in the currency of your choice or decide to receive a mix of currencies. You can then  manage all of your spending from one account to make remote spending affordable and simple.

Jeeves offers:

• Accounts in your currency (or currencies) of choice. There's no need to keep overseas bank accounts to make forex-fee-free transfers onto prepaid card accounts. With Jeeves, you can open global business accounts in up to four currencies and fund your card and payment transactions in one place.
• Global corporate cards. Since Jeeves is an international prepaid card, you won’t run the usual risk of blocked credit when remote employees spend in a currency outside your home currency account.

Sign up to Jeeves today. The application takes only takes 5 minutes and you'll receive a response in 24 hours.

Protect your bottom line with limited-fee global cards

We designed Jeeves to help your company grow. Here’s how:

• No cardholder fee. There are no monthly account or access charges on Jeeves’ virtual and physical cards, no matter how many you’ve issued or what country staff use them in. If you issue 40 cards, that can cost you up to £4,800 a year on Payhawk, Spendesk and Soldo. With Jeeves, it’s free.
• Cashback on all remote employee spending. Earn up to 1% cashback on all remote spending (regardless of currency or location) across all card spend.
• Airport lounge access. Save money on restaurants and bar bills, which rack up when an employee’s are stuck at the airport with delayed flights. Lounge Wi-Fi is also faster and more secure than standard airport Wi-Fi, meaning a safer connection to work systems when travelling.
• Extra rewards on SaaS. Get up to 25% off eligible Slack plans, 10% off international shipping with Freightcom, $1,000 off any team plan in Notion, and up to 50% off global health insurance for remote employees and contractors with Safetywing. Check out all of the rewards you’ll receive with Jeeves. 

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Use a spend management tool that rewards you as you spend locally, globally and remotely. Try Jeeves.

Give each employee a card wherever they are for greater control

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If you have sister companies incorporated overseas, you can open a Jeeves account in each country denominated in the currency of your choice.

If you operate from one country with no overseas entities and you have a remote team based around the world, you can issue virtual cards for each worker. There’s no need to set up separate overseas accounts as Jeeves bills you in your home currency.

With both business structures, you can: 

• Issue an unlimited number of free cards. Provide a free virtual card to every remote team member and monitor their spending in real-time on the Jeeves dashboard.

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• Spend straight away. As soon as you issue a virtual card for a remote employee, they’re able to start spending on it straight away. No more having to borrow other cards temporarily, which complicates accounting.
• Pay everywhere with ease. Jeeves is a global card meaning that there’s no risk of blocked debit, prepaid or credit cards in foreign countries or currencies.
• Use online or in-person. Staff can add virtual cards to digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay for in-person use, like entertaining a potential customer.
• Set individual credit limits per employee. Change individual card limits straight away via the Jeeves dashboard if your employees need access to more cash for additional purchases or unexpected business opportunities. No need to find the cash, convert it into a foreign currency and then upload it to a prepaid card.

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• Provide each employee with unique logins. When you issue each team member their own Jeeves card, each remote employee can log into Jeeves to review their purchase history on both the app and dashboard. They can also attach receipts to transactions with the Jeeves App or dashboard and monitor their own spending whether they’re on the go or sitting at their desks. Coming soon – automated expense requests and approvals. 

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• Build trust. It’s difficult to build a team across many different countries. Remote employees view rolling off an expense card for them as a sign of trust, which can increase their motivation and company loyalty.

Start using Jeeves to take control of remote employee spend

With Jeeves, your spend management for remote employees is easy. You settle your account in one currency, all overseas transactions appear live on your dashboard, and you only have one account, no matter the number of your remote employees.

We help you control costs better to protect your bottom line and make spending at the home office and around the world more visible and trackable.

Looking for a remote employee spend management solution with an attached credit card account? Try Jeeves.