The Business Travel Magazine December/January 2018/19

ARRIVALS
THE KNOWLEDGE
How to...
Make the most of corporate cards
The Scout Association is a long-time user
of corporate cards, but the ways in
which it deploys them has changed
THE BACKGROUND
The Scout Association
provides youth work support to
638,000 young people and adult
volunteers across the UK. A longterm
Barclaycard customer, its
staff have typically used
corporate cards for a
range of travel and
subsistence costs.
STREAMLINING
“While the kinds of things
we purchase with our
cards have stayed
consistent over the years,
we have taken advantage
of technological developments
to speed up our reconciliation
process with Barclaycard,” says The Scout
Association’s Simon Carter.
As a result, it now reconciles its corporate
card expenses digitally every month. Carter
explains: “We try to do everything
electronically. We used to reconcile expenses
by hand, but we conducted a study that
showed it would save time – and therefore
money – to move to digital reconciliation.”
He continues: “As a charity, you want to
put as much money as possible into your
cause rather than the back office.”
GO PRE-PAID
Every four years, the
organisation sends 4,000
young people from the UK
to The World Scout
Jamboree, which takes
place in destinations all
over the world – mostly
recently in Japan in 2015.
At the event, in addition to those who
already had company credit cards, The Scout
Association provided 40 staff with a pre-paid
Barclaycard corporate card, which they used
for car hire, food and other travel expenses.
“The cards mean we can control costs
really easily,” says Carter. “We can see what
our teams are spending on, and we don’t
have to provide them with lots of cash.”
NEW LIMITS
At times, corporate
cards have also helped
the team resolve
challenging situations.
“After a Jamboree we
hosted in Thailand finished, we
sent 400 young people on a home
hospitality visit to Malaysia,” explains
Carter. “I was woken up at 3am by a phone
call from the head of our contingent in
Malaysia saying that, for various reasons,
the planned accommodation wasn’t
available. I called our director of finance,
who contacted the Barclaycard out-of-hours
service, who in turn raised the credit card
limit of the person on the spot to £25,000.
“The leader of the contingent then
sourced safe and secure hotel rooms for
400 young people and their leaders. It
was so simple.”
THE BENEFITS
Corporate cards are key to The Scout
Association’s operations, whether it’s
for resolving unexpected situations or
simply paying for
food and drink.
“Cards make it
easy to control
costs and provide
excellent visibility
on spending,” says
Carter. “The key
thing for us is the
flexibility they
offer. We use a traditional purchase
order process for most of our regular
costs, but sometimes you simply don’t
have time to wait – you need to pay for
something there and then and a card
makes that possible.”
THEBUSINESSTRAVELMAG.COM
15