Control spend before it happens with spend limits

Businesses must spend to increase their revenue; spend control is the process of monitoring and controlling these business spends that occur due to regular business operations.

Some common methods to implement effective spend control include using prepaid or debit corporate cards, using a centralised expense management platform, and defining clear approval flows and expense policies. These tools help businesses set adequate budgets and spend limits, which can help them control spending effectively.

Spending limits can help businesses ensure financial discipline. It prevents unregulated spending, which helps businesses establish adequate spend controls and efficient cash flow management.

Businesses can set spend limits which are time-based (e.g. $10,000 for the month), expense category-based (e.g. $10,000 for marketing spends) or transaction-based (e.g. $1,000 for an office coffee machine). Businesses can set them up to issue once or recur on an ongoing basis (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly). Businesses can also use it with ‘Merchant locks’ whereby the limits are available only for a list of specified merchants/vendors (e.g. FB ads, LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads, etc.). This ensures that any expenditures made by the employees are within budget and as per the defined policies.

Spend limit is one of the many features available within budgeting. With Aspire, you can plan budgets across your organisation and then specify spending limits to control and track spending within a specific budget. This ensures that you never exceed the budget limits. Thus, you can control the budgets top-down, prevent overspending before it happens, and track everything in real-time.

With Aspire, you can:

• Set budgets across geographies, offices, departments, or teams. Create spend limits for more granular planning and tracking
• Customise spend limits for expense categories like business travel, vendor payments, office utilities, etc.
• Enable employees to use multiple corporate cards to segregate spends with ease by using Aspire’s unlimited virtual corporate cards.
• Track actual spending against your budgets and receive real-time notifications when the budget limit is reached, or a specific transaction is attempted.

Yes. With Aspire you can get real-time notifications when a spend limit is reached or a transaction is attempted. Businesses also have real-time visibility on the budget amount utilization, which facilitates speedier adjustments and better financial planning.