Purchasing Cards' New Velocity

Companies are enjoying growing benefits from their p-cards, thanks to better technology and carefully designed programs.

When the quartet of hurricanes whipped through Florida this summer, the city of Fort Lauderdale needed to immediately deploy emergency response personnel to cities harder hit by the storms. However, those employees did not have permission to put their travel expenses on their city-issued purchasing cards (p-cards).

A few years ago, this might have caused serious delays in Fort Lauderdale's disaster-response effort, but Kirk Buffington, the city's director of procurement services, was able to remedy the situation right away through the Web-based software from Works Inc. that he uses to manage Fort Lauderdale's p-card program. "Within two to three minutes, we could change their profiles so they could make emergency purchases," he says.

To be sure, few other organizations are likely to need purchasing cards to respond to natural disasters. Yet Buffington's experience demonstrates how far the cards have come. A decade ago, most p-card programs were paper-based and required a fair amount of manual intervention. "You would get a paper statement at the end of the billing cycle and go to accounting to key it in," says David Cramer, a Charlotte, N.C.-based senior vice president of commercial sales with Visa USA. In contrast, many programs today capture transaction information at the point of sale and electronically transmit it to the purchasing organization, often within 24 or 48 hours. They also enable employees to view their purchases online.