New ways to optimize expense management | Extend
New ways to optimize expense management in Extend
TL;DR
- Extend just launched a suite of new features designed to simplify finance workflows, enhance visibility, and give teams more flexibility over spend management.
- Bill Pay lets finance teams send secure virtual cards directly to vendors via email for invoice payments—reducing fraud, eliminating paper checks, and keeping transactions organized.
- Automated expense reports now generate at the end of each billing cycle, combining all virtual and physical card transactions for faster reconciliation and seamless accounting syncs.
- New roles and permissions add precision to access control, introducing Card Manager and Guest roles, while Owners/Admins gain expanded edit capabilities across accounts.
- Teams can now group users into departments for better organization and future spend tracking, and customize transaction lists to fit unique accounting workflows.
- Altogether, these updates make Extend a more powerful hub for spend control, team management, and accounting efficiency—helping finance teams save time and work smarter.
As businesses grow, so do the complexities of managing expenses. That’s why we’re constantly evolving Extend with new features to simplify workflows, boost control, and give you even more flexibility to handle spending your way.
This time around, we’re excited to introduce a fresh set of tools to streamline everything from invoice payments to expense reports.
Simplify invoice payments with bill pay
If your current invoice payment process involves paper checks or keeping a single card on file across multiple vendors, it’s likely messy and hard to manage. That’s where bill pay comes in to simplify things.
With this new feature, finance and accounts payable teams have a dedicated workflow to share secure virtual cards with vendors directly via email. Teams can pay invoices in exact amounts—one at a time or in bulk—while attaching relevant documentation for a smooth, streamlined experience. This means less fraud, wrongful billing, and delayed payments and more control and visibility over every transaction.
Business impact
Streamline invoice payments, control costs, save time on your AP process, and earn more card rewards—all while giving vendors a fast, secure way to receive payments.
Streamline reconciliation with automated expense reports
If your team is spending too much time and mental energy reconciling card statements each month, automated expense reports are for you.
As an Owner or Admin in Extend, you can set up a reporting cycle that matches each registered card’s billing statement. At the end of each billing cycle, you’ll automatically receive a report for that cycle including all virtual card transactions (plus any linked physical card transactions), so you can quickly review transactions, flag issues, and address missing receipts.
You can also tag expense categories and push transactions directly to your connected accounting platform, creating a seamless flow from start to finish.
Business impact
Close the books faster by minimizing the time and effort your team spends sorting, organizing, and matching transactions at month-end—freeing them to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Set your team up for success with roles and permissions
Keeping track of spending is easier when everyone has the right level of access. With our recent updates to roles and permissions, each team member can get exactly the access they need to do their job — no more, no less.
Owner and Admin enhancements: Owners and Admins now have edit rights across all registered credit card accounts—meaning they can create, update and deactivate all virtual cards and budgets within their organization. This gives them the meaningful control and flexibility needed to manage spend.
Card Manager: This new role type is perfect for a department head or manager. Card Managers can not only register company card accounts in Extend, but their Owner can grant them full edit rights to other registered card accounts. This ensures that they have the access they need to manage the accounts, budgets, and virtual cards within their designated responsibilities.
Guest: This new role type is ideal for freelancers, interns, or contract employees, Guests have limited access and visibility within Extend. They can view their virtual cards, attach receipts, tag expense categories, and submit out-of-pocket expenses, but they can't register a credit card, use budgets, or view org members and settings.
Business impact
Empower your team with more control and oversight, enable smoother operations, and get more flexibility by delegating. With everyone's responsibilities clearly defined, you’ll also reduce bottlenecks and ensure everyone has what they need to do their job.
Boost organization with departments
Keeping track of spending across different parts of your organization just got a lot easier too. In the organization settings on Extend’s web app, Owners and Admins can group team members into departments based on their roles and responsibilities.
This setup makes it easy to view, organize, and manage your team in Extend, keeping everything structured and accessible, right from the People page.
Business impact
Keep your team organized, gain better oversight, and prepare for new tools that will boost spending control and visibility even further.
Control your accounting workflow with custom transaction lists
Every team’s workflow is unique, so why not make your transactions view work harder for your team? With custom transaction lists, you can gain more control over your accounting workflow and keep the most important data front and center.
Through the Expenses page of the web app, you can customize:
- Table view: Add, move, resize, or remove columns to create a view that fits your workflow and highlights the data that matters most.
- CSV exports: Choose the specific columns you want in your CSV exports. Extend will remember your choices—making it easy to keep your CSVs consistent every time you download from the same device and browser.
Business impact
Empower your team with more control and convenience over their accounting workflows, saving time on daily tasks and making processes much more efficient.
Unlock better expense management with Extend’s new features
Extend is here to support your finance team with expense management tools that'll save you time, boost control, and make everyday processes easier. Whether you’re fine-tuning your accounting workflow or organizing your team for success, these updates are designed to help you work smarter, not harder.
Want a closer look? Join us for our upcoming webinar, where we'll dive into these new features and show you how to make the most of them.
If you’re ready to put these features to work, just log in to your account to explore the latest tools and enhancements.
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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.