Global expansion increases complexity.
Today’s businesses are increasingly global and distributed, creating operational complexity. You may have overseas vendors, employees and contractors in different countries, and/or global subsidiaries subject to local tax regulations. Whether you have a finance team in each location or you’re handling it from HQ, managing global spend can be manual and time-consuming.
Because despite the globalization of business, most spend management tools still aren’t built for global operations. Providers may tout “global” capabilities, but in reality their cards simply work internationally (as every Mastercard or Visa does), or they may serve a few additional non-US markets. Very few of them actually support a truly global set of countries and currencies.
As a result, most companies operating globally end up using different corporate card, travel, expense, and procurement providers in each non-US market. Finance and IT teams then have to manage multiple systems, expensive IT integrations, and unsustainable technology sprawl.
Operating globally is the future of business, so being able to manage global spend effectively is table stakes for any business that wants to scale long-term. This guide explores how to streamline the complexities of managing global spend and how the right global approach also unlocks the local adaptability, such as to currencies and customs, required for long-term business success.
Five ways to manage global spend strategically.
It’s critical to optimize global spend management, because having a disjointed and inefficient approach can actually chip away at the cost-savings and efficiency of global expansion. It can also slow down your whole team, from the CFO to accountants, managers, and employees.
To help you reap the benefits of global operations while simplifying complexity, this guide outlines five future-proof ways to approach global spend management.
1. Don’t just spend globally, operate in local currencies too.
While most banks and corporate cards work anywhere (i.e., you can swipe your card or send wires globally), it’s important to consider the value of operating in each market’s local currency too. A global solution with support for local currencies allows you to adapt to the local market and minimize the impact of foreign exchange fluctuations, while maintaining centralized control.
When you can issue budgets, cards, and reimbursements — and pay your statements and fund your reimbursements — in the local currency from local bank accounts in any market, you can avoid the burden of intercompany transactions and foreign exchange fees. Plus, your employees can get reimbursed in just days (without payroll) into their local bank account and in their local currency.
As you consider global solutions with support for local currencies, it’s important to look for ones that not only support common currencies like the euro and Canadian dollar, but also hard-to-serve currencies such as peso, Singapore dollars, real, rupee, and shekel. Keep your doors open, so you can take advantage of fast-growing or cost-effective markets.
“Consolidating onto Brex’s global cards for our teams around the world allows us to see and analyze spend across our entities in one dashboard — all while operating in local currencies.”
— Mike Duffy, Director, Assistant Controller at Lemonade
2. Ensure compliance in every country you transact in.
Transacting globally is only half of the equation. For every transaction, finance teams must ensure both tax compliance and expense policy compliance, so they can close the books on a global scale. A truly global spend management solution is built to make compliance easy and automated, no matter where teams live, work, and spend.
For example, solutions can increase compliance by allowing you to pre-approve spend in local currency with embedded policies that are auto-enforced. Using AI to auto-generate receipts that are compliant with local tax rules can also save you hours of receipt chasing. In addition, look for features like multi-language OCR technology that matches receipts in any language or currency, and flexible VAT tracking to capture and store tax details within your ERP.
When you can more easily adhere to local regulations, your finance teams can spend more time analyzing data to optimize global spend versus manually reconciling transactions or chasing employees for receipts, and your business will be better positioned as controllers close each subsidiary’s books more efficiently and accurately.
“With the other platforms, we were constantly working to accommodate the employee after the fact. With Brex, we’re proactively provisioning spend and establishing controls up front. We’re automating our compliance work, which means less troubleshooting for the finance team."
— Senior accounting manager, leading educational technology firm
3. Adapt your policies and processes to local markets.
Expanding globally doesn’t just mean replicating your US budgets, processes, and policies in other countries. It’s important to adapt to local customs, currencies, regulations, and team expectations while maintaining global consistency and visibility.
Successful multinational businesses empower their local entities to operate in the local currency, from local bank accounts vs. having to constantly make intercompany transactions. Another best practice is to enable location-specific employee spending, as each foreign market may have different customs for expenses like travel, per diem allowances, stipends, and procurement.
To enable localized spend, you need to be able to issue spending budgets in the local currency and create localized expense policies. You’ll also want a solution with multi-entity ERP support so you can auto-map transactions to each subsidiary’s GL accounts in your ERP.
The most effective localized approach is one enabled by a single system. You want each team to feel empowered without having to maintain separate systems or spend tons of money on IT to build custom tools or struggle with manual workarounds. This also makes your business more agile, as the system can evolve as your business processes and markets change.
“As a remote team with people all over the world, being able to easily track expenses, approve reimbursements, and create virtual cards has been a game changer for our operations team.”
— Rafa Tihanyi, Senior Director of Operations, Graphite
4. Deliver an exceptional experience with 24/7 global support.
For finance teams and admins at your HQ, having to keep track of multiple spend solutions worldwide is a manual and time-intensive process, leading to errors and detracting from strategic work. And when the user experience is disjointed, your global and traveling employees may not feel empowered — or worse, they may fail to comply with your expense and travel policies, simply because they’re not easy to understand or access.
The global solution you put in place needs to deliver a personalized experience to every layer of your company with a first-class mobile app, self-service options, and 24/7 customer support through multiple channels, including chat and WhatsApp. It should also automate or eliminate manual tasks like receipt and memo collection and integrate seamlessly with your HRIS and ERP systems to streamline processes — from employee onboarding to closing the books — on a global scale.
With such a solution, your spend workflows will be future-proof. Each employee or team will feel like their card, travel, reimbursements, and expense tools were built for them — while the finance team will become the hero instead of the money police because teams are happy to comply (and spared from antiquated, time-intensive systems and processes).
“Before Brex, we used SAP Concur. Concur was a whole beast in and of itself. It was far too clunky for the finance team to use, especially in terms of UI.”
— Senior accounting manager, leading educational technology firm
5. Use real-time visibility to get more from global spend.
The ultimate benefit of having a single solution for all global spend is real-time, unified visibility. Just imagine a world where you can view and manage a single corporate limit across your global teams, provisioning cards in different currencies when needed. Where all of your global spend — cards, reimbursements, travel, procurement, and bill pay — is visible to you in real time, in a single dashboard, in the currencies you want to see.
With a global system of live budgets, you’ll be able to influence spend before it occurs, and you see how spend is tracking against budgets in real time, communicate with global leaders, and make tradeoffs based on market conditions and opportunities to drive better ROI.
And when the reconciliation process across markets is mostly automated, you only have to manage exceptions, so you have more time to review, analyze, and plan for future spend versus jumping through hoops. All of this is the future of expense management, and it’s easy to achieve with Brex.
“Before Brex, we had to use different systems globally, for cards, reimbursements, travel, and expense management... It was hard to get an accurate picture of what and how much we were spending.”
— Juan Miguel Salazar Muñoz, Controlling Analyst, Incode Technologies
Manage your spend with a system built for global.
Brex cards, expense management, reimbursements, travel, and bill pay were built for global businesses from the start — not retrofitted as the world has changed. It’s always been our mission to give customers a unified way to spend globally and operate locally. We strive to make global expense management as easy as any other workplace software like Slack, Figma, or Gmail.
Your employees need to spend locally in multiple countries and currencies, and your finance team needs to enable and manage that spend while maintaining policy and tax compliance. We make it all easy and cost-effective with:
Locally adaptable spend tools: Our one-of-a-kind payments infrastructure enables your teams to transact, invoice, get reimbursed, and pay bills in local currency or USD. With Brex, you can issue credit cards or reimburse employees in more countries and currencies across every region of the world.
Automation and global compliance: One consistent, consumer-grade experience that automates tasks globally to eliminate manual errors, ensures global receipt capture across languages and currencies, and tracks VAT across markets.
A consistent experience: Set up your organization and billing globally and locally. Manage all of your global subsidiaries from one dashboard, while allowing each to operate independently in local currency with local budgets and policies, local billing, and transactions auto-mapped to their ERP.
Visibility and control: A single solution to proactively manage all of your global T&E and procurement spend in local currency in real-time with one card and reimbursements program that covers all global employees across all of your global subsidiaries.
Discover how Brex can help you manage global spending and teams more cost-effectively and quickly — whether you’re operating in 1 location or 100.