It only took a few weeks for a New York-based, 23-employee events and media firm to solve one of its most persistent financial bottlenecks—manual audits and expense reconciliation. The secret? Intelligent corporate cards.
GF Sports & Entertainment struggled for years with a chaotic, outdated system. Every month ended with chasing receipts and matching them to unclear statement lines. Employees often used shared cards, which made it difficult to untangle commingled details and identify policy violations.
The small but agile company decided to adopt Emburse’s card-centric, intelligent spend management system. Within a week, the finance team issued physical and virtual corporate cards with built-in company policies to proactively guide employee spend behaviors.
In just two months, GF Sports & Entertainment was able to stabilize its new system, achieve its target return on investment, and reclaim at least eight hours of valuable time every month—a full workday that the company now spends on higher-impact tasks.
The risk of manual expense systems and "trust-based" cards
The challenge that GF Sports & Entertainment faced is not an isolated case. It is the default operational reality for a vast number of businesses, rooted in the fundamental fallacy of relying on manual systems and shared corporate cards.
In reality, the decades-old model—giving a few “trusted” employees a card with a high limit—is not a tool for control. It is a payment tool with a 30-day reporting lag that forces finance teams to be reactive forensic accountants for their own company’s spending.
The traditional trust-based model is like a blank check and invites risk. A 2025 survey found that 79% of organizations faced payment fraud attempts last year. Sharing a card number in emails or on vendor sites increases this risk.
There's also internal friction. An Emburse report showed that nearly a quarter of employees admitted to claiming personal purchases as business expenses, blaming a frustrating system. And this is why leaders must act to control employee spending and prevent expense fraud.
Perhaps the highest cost of manual systems and shared cards is the total lack of real-time expense tracking. With a 30-day lag, it is impossible for a business owner or finance leader to make an agile budget decision. You are, in effect, driving the business by looking in the rearview mirror.
A November 2025 report from EY on the pain points of modern finance leaders identified this as the top challenge: “The need for one truth.” It means leaders are demanding a new model—one that provides a single source of trusted, real-time data before the money is spent.
Corporate cards for proactive spend control
The call for 'one truth' and real-time data drives a major change. Small businesses are changing how they manage expenses. Finance leaders use intelligent systems to move on from tracking spending to actually controlling it.
They are adapting a new model that embeds expense policies directly into the payment tool itself, creating a configurable, intelligent system. And when properly integrated, an intelligent corporate card system delivers transformative benefits:
- It stops cash leakage by enforcing your rules on every swipe. You set the rules, such as merchant categories, spending limits, or even time-of-day restrictions. An out-of-policy purchase (like a $200 dinner on a $75 limit) is simply declined before it happens. No more manual corrections or awkward “sorry, I'll pay it back” conversations.
- It ends the “shared card” chaos. Instead of one card number floating in emails, you can instantly issue a unique virtual card for every subscription or vendor (like your Google Ads or software tools), each with its own specific budget. You see exactly where every dollar is going and can cancel one subscription's card without disrupting all your other payments.
- It gives you back your month-end (and your evenings). As soon as an employee buys something, they receive a phone prompt for the receipt. The system matches and categorizes the transaction automatically. This means that the 8-hour, end-of-month receipt chase is no longer needed.
- It provides an accurate, real-time dashboard for your finances. Instead of waiting 30 days for a statement, you see exactly how much cash is committed, who is spending, and where it's going, right now. This is how you make agile budget decisions before you've overspent.
How SMBs can thrive with Emburse Cards
This shift from reactive reconciliation to proactive control is precisely what Emburse Cards are designed to enable. Our platform and its smart corporate cards are not just a tool for payments, but a smart way to execute your finance strategy at every level, with every purchase.
Our platform enables you to design a budget and, with a few clicks, issue virtual and physical cards that automatically enforce it, freeing your team to make the right purchases without ever having to second-guess the rules.
With intelligent cards in place, you can sit back in your office—or even in transit if you’re traveling for business—and track your employees’ spending in real time and with granularity.
Having a live, accurate view of your cash flow enables you to create robust financial forecasts and make informed decisions with confidence.
In the end, it’s not just about saving dollars on policy errors, but more of reclaiming your most valuable asset—your time—and reinvesting it into high-value work that will lead your company to growth.
If you’re ready to empower your finance team and streamline your expense management, contact us today to schedule a demo of Emburse Cards and our software solutions. Take the next step toward smarter, more controlled business spending—reach out now to see how we can help your organization.