What Are Prepaid Visa Cards?

You may already be familiar with the idea of using prepaid cards for purchases. Perhaps you buy them for presents or to provide your kids a way to make purchases when they leave home on school trips or to visit Grandma. Did you also know that many companies have discovered that they can use prepaid business cards to work more efficiently?

To help you understand how you can use prepaid Visas to help your company run more efficiently, it may help to learn a couple of terms:

• Close-loop cards: Some types of purchase cards are only good for use at certain merchants, and these are called closed-loop cards.
• Open-loop cards: Typically, you will want to obtain open-loop cards if you want to offer them to your employees for on-the-job purchases. They might have a brand-name card logo on them, so almost all merchants will recognize and accept them.

Even though most merchants will accept open-loop cards, you can obtain a prepaid Visa for business that lets you restrict their use to only certain kinds of merchants. You can even set different restrictions on different employees. That makes these perfect tools to help you run your company.

How Do Prepaid Visa Cards Work for Business?

Prepaid Visa cards that work as open-loop cards function pretty much like debit or credit cards when employees need to buy fuel, materials, or other things that you allow workers to purchase to do their jobs. At the same time, you can use your own app’s dashboard to restrict employees from using the business prepaid Visa at merchants that you don’t approve of.

For example, you might send salespeople out of town to service clients. You can add money to each salesperson’s prepaid Visa card to pay for lodging, travel, meals, and other approved expenses. However, you can restrict them from using their cards to shop for clothes, electronics, or other non-approved purchases.

This is how the card works:

• If a salesperson tries to use your company’s prepaid Visa card at a merchant that you have restricted, the card simply gets declined for the purchase.
• Your app will notify you of any declines right away, so you will know exactly what happened.

In addition, you can also set daily spending limits, so your salespeople will know that they need to cooperate to manage their budgets. If they go over the spending limit, they won’t be able to use their prepaid Visa card for the rest of the day unless you adjust the restriction. This process can keep you from agonizing over reimbursement forms, and it should also help your people learn to help you control business expenses.

In fact, The Balance reported an increase in use of these kinds of cards in all kinds of companies. They offer an effective way to help check expenses and reduce paperwork. Meanwhile, employees usually appreciate having a card in their own name that they can use to buy what they need.

How to Try Out Prepaid Cards for Your Business

If you’ve never used these kinds of business cards before, Bento for Business wants to welcome you to try out their business Visa debit cards and management app. You might also want to learn more about other business owner’s experiences with Bento to understand how Bento’s products can help you run your own company more efficiently.

To get started, you can simply enroll in a free trial and transfer money securely via the provided app. If you’re still not certain how a business Visa debit card can benefit your business, why not request a live demo or call us at 866.220.8455 today?

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