Payments made by Commercial Cards have been shown to reduce the real cost of processing purchase requisitions and invoices from more than $70 to less than $5 per invoice. For every 10,000 invoices processed per year, that's a realistically attainable annual cost reduction of $650,000.

Purchasing Cards should interest you because...

A big advantage of implementing a Purchasing Card programme is the disciplines and controls it enforces which enable you to take a bigger picture view of your wider procurement operation. Purchasing Cards allow you to streamline your suppliers for maximum discount attainment, take major cost out of your Purchase to Pay process and deliver complete manageability with on-line services.

Sometimes referred to as "walking plastic", Corporate Cards are the credit cards you give to your employees for everyday "expensed" payments. These payments are often collectively referred to as "travel and entertainment" (T&E) expenditure and typically include hotels, meals, taxis, airline tickets etc...

The widespread acceptance of credit cards make Corporate Cards ideally suited to employees who travel or regularly incur expenses on the organisation's behalf. But it's what goes on behind the scenes that really makes Corporate Cards a clear choice for T&E expenditure, such as being able to...

• electronically review cardholder transactions daily and browse statements on-line, providing a significant degree of visibility and control over card usage.
• automatically generate a downloadable file straight to your General Ledger, hugely improving programme management and removing manual intevention.
• automatically generate expense claims and review or approve them on-line, eliminating the inefficiencies associated with cumbersome expense management processes and employee expense claims.
• comprehensively report on day-to-day expenditure at the click of a mouse-button, establishing a powerful control that is unmatched by other payment methods.

On-line management of a Corporate Card programme is the most proficient and expedient way to administer T&E expenditure.

"Lodge" is the name given to a "virtual card" (it may not actually exist) that is "lodged" with a Travel Agent such that all corporate flights can be charged against it. The reason for doing this is that, through Deecal, all monetary transaction data from your Bank can be matched to the detailed "enhanced" data from the Travel Agent, to provide a set of detailed travel reports and accompanying export file for import into your General Ledger.

"Enhanced Data" is the term given to the non-monetary detailed information from any source other than your Issuing Bank. In the case of air travel charged to a Lodge Card that has been lodged with your Travel Agent, this enhanced data may include such information as date traveled, airline, who traveled, from where, to where, flight number, time etc.... This information is typically used by the Corporate customer to negotiate improved terms with specific Airlines, perhaps within specific times etc...

Lodge is operated by your Issuer as a bureau service which means that the service is available to you even if you do not have internet capability.