With 2023 expected to be a year of economic turmoil and uncertainty, many businesses are faced with setting up or improving processes to be better prepared to manage financial challenges.

To mitigate operational risk in the current environment, it’s more important than ever for organizations to reduce costs by enhancing visibility into and control over business spending–an area typically rife with inefficiencies and unnecessary outlays.

But to effectively optimize spending, businesses must be able to easily and intelligently track expenses at a division, department, group and team level in order to identify patterns or developing trends that could indicate areas of potential saving for expense management. 

A smarter way to track spending. 

To help corporate payment and expense management providers offer their business clients this dynamic spend monitoring capability, Galileo has rolled out a new feature, Corporate Hierarchy, that serves as a native method of organizing corporate payment card accounts into a multi-tiered system of organized groups or groupings. This may also be referred to as a spend taxonomy.

These groupings can be organized in whichever structure best suits a particular client, including:

• A program manager serving small businesses can create a card account for each of its client companies and subsequently can create expense dashboards for each client company that show total spending and track ongoing trends.

• A program manager serving a large corporation can create various groups and subgroups corresponding to specific divisions, departments, groups and teams within that single company. The program manager then can create dashboards displaying spending data and trends for any specific group or subgroup level. 

The intelligent structuring of a spend taxonomy enables a corporate payment or expense management provider to give their clients access to spending data for all relevant cardholder accounts–whether companywide or sorted by specific department or team–by leveraging Galileo’s application programming interfaces (APIs), rather than having to sort the data manually. 

“Without a hierarchical structure, these providers would have to do the extra work to filter through all of the card spending data on their end to find the relevant data for a client.  This is a time consuming approach which can be fraught with challenges,” noted Galileo Senior Product Manager Gisela Ruiz.

Leverage enhanced data for budgeting, fraud protection. 

Access to this dynamic, granular spend data can help inform corporate budgeting decisions and enable businesses to optimize allocation of precious financial resources by laying bare areas of potential overspending. 

It also can be used to more easily identify instances of potential fraud, said Ruiz.

“If a corporate payment card provider sees that a certain client is having a ton of chargebacks, for example, having a feature like Corporate Hierarchy can help the client quickly get to the root of it,” Ruiz noted. “Without group-level spend visibility, it would be much harder to identify that pattern, because they wouldn’t know which accounts are linked.”

One Galileo client is leveraging Corporate Hierarchy in conjunction with Galileo’s Payment Risk Platform solution to set group-specific parameters for approved purchasing activity and proactively block transactions that fall outside of those guidelines during the authorization process, Ruiz added. 

Click here for the top 6 tips for payment fraud prevention.

Along with enhanced visibility into spending and fraud management, this hierarchical arrangement of a spend taxonomy can be combined with group-level budgeting (or budgeting) controls and support for corporate lines of credit, which Galileo plans to provide in the future.

“Through our Corporate Hierarchy solution, we’re giving more options to our clients to monitor spend. This is a foundational but important feature in providing an improved account structure for B2B expense management.” 

Click here to learn more about the Galileo Corporate Hierarchy solution.