How Extend budgets help you organize and empower secure employee spending

Author

Lisa Maris Richner

Guest Author

TL;DR

• Payment fraud continues to rise — 84% of large companies and 65% of all businesses faced attempted or actual fraud last year, often driven by risky habits like sharing company cards.
• Extend Budgets solve this by letting finance teams delegate spending securely: leaders can set limits, share access, and track transactions in real time — no physical card sharing required.
• Budgets empower employees to manage approved spend for projects, departments, or clients while finance retains full visibility and control.
• Businesses can co-manage budgets, auto-replenish funds, and instantly issue virtual cards from shared budgets, ensuring operational continuity and fraud prevention.
• Example: a multi-location gym can assign each site its own budget to cover local expenses, keeping spend organized, secure, and easy to reconcile.
• The result — more autonomy for teams, more control for finance, and less fraud risk across the entire organization.

According to the 2023 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report by JPMorgan, 84% of businesses with revenues over $1 billion reported instances of attempted or actual fraud last year. This issue isn't just a problem for large corporations; it's a widespread concern, with 65% of companies surveyed acknowledging their battle with B2B payment fraud.

While there will always be bad actors to combat, a large driver of fraud happens from innocent but risky practices like sharing login credentials for software or physical credit cards among teams.

Yet businesses only engage in such unsecured practices to fulfill the essential needs of paying vendors on time, equipping uncarded employees in a pinch, and delegating payment responsibility across the organization to move faster.

It’s imperative for businesses to empower their teams, but they shouldn’t have to compromise security and control.

Extend budgets can help.

What are Extend budgets?

Budgets are a powerful tool for finance teams to control and organize spending while giving employees a secure and convenient way to manage expenses.

For instance, some businesses may need to:

• Equip uncarded employees with a convenient way to manage business expenses for their team, clients, or projects;
• Give specific team members partial or full access to the business credit line to pay bills;
• Enable the CFO to delegate responsibility;
• Ensure temporary coverage over spending when an employee is away on PTO or;
• Empower employees to co-manage budgets for projects, events, or travel.

The great thing about budgets is that they allow finance leaders to delegate spending while maintaining control and real-time visibility into expenses. Budgets also eliminate the need to share physical cards across the organization, giving employees a safer and more efficient way to access company funds.

The benefits of Extend budgets

Budgets bring a suite of advantages to businesses of all sizes, improving how they manage and control company spending.

Here’s a look at the key benefits:

• Organization and control over virtual card spending for various expenses across the entire company
• Increased efficiency with employees empowered to manage spend via pre-approved virtual cards, eliminating lengthy approval cycles and cash reimbursements
• Secure spending that does away with credit card sharing and the risk of payment fraud
• Flexible workflows for scenarios that require more than one employee managing the virtual credit card program

These benefits help business owners improve spend management while giving Extend partner banks an in-demand feature to offer their clients. After all, nearly 80% of businesses are most likely to turn to their bank to mitigate the risks of payment fraud. By adopting Extend’s budget feature, banks help their clients move away from manual practices and embrace a safer and more streamlined approach to making business payments.

How Extend budgets work

To get the most out of Extend, we recommend starting with a budget and then creating virtual cards from that budget.

This ensures finance leaders maintain the flexibility to manage and share access to the company card program. It also cultivates a collaborative environment that ensures business continuity by allowing team members to step in and manage virtual cards if the budget owner is away.

Any virtual cards created outside of a budget will remain solely tied to the person who created them, making it challenging to delegate spending authority to other team members. Hence, budgets are preferred to safeguard and enable future flexibility.

Here’s how it works:

1. Create a budget: The registered cardholder must first create the budget in Extend. They can name it and set the limit to accommodate a specific project, department, client, location, or other expense category. They can auto-replenish the budget at a recurring frequency or completely remove the spend limit to enable full access to the funding card's credit line.

2. Share the budget: After establishing the controls, share it with up to 10 team members. When you share the budget, approved team members can co-manage the budget with you.

3. Manage virtual cards: Team members with access to a budget can create, update, and send virtual cards within the budget limit to cover various expense needs.

4. View spending as it happens: The person who created the budget retains complete visibility over all budget-related activity, from virtual cards created and modified to their associated spend. They can also modify or deactivate the budget at any time.

Team members who don’t have a company card but need to access company funds can request a budget in Extend . This is a convenient option for employees who need to make payments on behalf of the company for a particular project, like a team offsite.

Watch this video to learn more about budgets and how they work.

Introduction to Budgets | Extend Academy - YouTube

Extend budgets in action

Now, let's bring budgets to life!

Imagine a multi-location business, such as a network of gym franchises. Each franchise location has its own set of expenses ranging from maintenance costs and supply orders to equipment updates and software subscriptions. Managing those payments across multiple locations with one company card could quickly become a challenge and potentially lead to unauthorized spending or fraud.

With a budget created for each franchise, location managers could create and issue virtual cards for any necessary business expense. Doing so would keep spend neatly organized by franchise, helping streamline reconciliation. What’s more, the business would also avoid the risks that come with sharing physical credit cards or keeping the same card number on file with multiple vendors.

Empowered by budgets, location managers could quickly respond to site-specific needs and keep their gyms running smoothly without any interruptions that might otherwise diminish the customer experience. And finance leaders could lock away their plastic cards while retaining visibility and control over every transaction in Extend.

The result? More autonomy for trusted employees and more control and efficiency for company finance leaders.

Curious to hear from more businesses experiencing similar benefits? Check us out on G2!

Create your first budget in Extend

The beauty of Extend budgets is its ability to empower both the business as a whole and its employees.

Companies can scale financial operations to serve different payment scenarios with minimized fraud risk, while employees are empowered to take charge of payments, saving time and streamlining reconciliation.

Ready to take budgets for a spin and start benefiting from a seamless spend management experience?

Create your first budget

About the author

Lisa Maris Richner
Guest Author
As a strategic product leader with a track record of innovation, Lisa has over 10 years of experience launching and managing leading financial services products. Before joining Extend, she launched new payment solutions, grew their largest consumer lending product, and advised C-Level executives at American Express. She developed her design thinking approach to product development at Interbrand, an Omnicom agency, where she consulted global financial services clients after starting her career in finance. Lisa holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA in Economics from Cornell University.