Every year, our customers remind us that the most valuable takeaways from our global AppZen on Tour and Customer Advisory Board meetings are the customer panels and lively group conversations. This year, we were curious to learn how finance teams manage their corporate card programs. What consumes most of their time? What’s working for them? What isn’t? 

The patterns that emerged from these discussions were sometimes surprising. Regardless of where we met them–Austin, TX; Frankfurt, Germany; London, UK; or Atlanta, GA–we discovered that legacy corporate card programs aren’t working nearly as well as they should. In their own words, here’s what that looks like for our customers.

“[Our company] is in about 70 countries, and we only support about 40 because we just don’t have the bandwidth and resources. In our Latin American team, we have three people managing 12 countries, but we have about 10 more that they can’t support because they don’t have the bandwidth. They do a 100% audit [and] they do it manually.”

 

AppZen on Tour Panelist

The corporate card challenges no one talks about

Like most finance teams, our attendees thought corporate cards would bring order to the chaos of employee spending. No more expense reports floating through email, no more reimbursement checks. More clarity around who spent what, where, and why. But somewhere between that promise and the reality, there’s a disconnect.

If you look at adoption alone, our customers’ corporate card programs appear to be successful, with many driving to 95%+ usage. Unfortunately, those numbers mask the truth that behind every processed transaction is a maze of manual workarounds, lost data, and reconciliation difficulties that consume thousands of hours a year. That leaves finance departments still dealing with the complexity these programs were meant to eliminate.

“With lodge cards, when you’re booking a flight, you get one invoice but two separate charges. And if you get a refund, depending on the travel agent’s system, you either get a variation of that invoice—version one, two, or three—or a totally new invoice. So reconciling that is extremely difficult.”

 

AppZen Customer Advisory Board member

A corporate card reconciliation crisis

A business traveler booking a flight seems simple enough. Except that single booking generates multiple charges across different dates. Now multiply that complexity across hundreds of employees, thousands of transactions, and dozens of merchants. Add in hotel bookings where the room is charged on check-in, but incidentals are posted days later. Or group bookings where one invoice covers multiple travelers, yet charges appear on different cards. The result is a reconciliation puzzle.

“Our bigger problem is virtual cards and ghost cards, those transactions where, when they’re charged, they can’t identify who it’s associated to,” shared another Customer Advisory Board member. Designed for security and control, these cards often lack the basic identifying information needed to track spending. The feature meant to enhance control creates blind spots, undermining the entire program.

“When you talk about issuing a single-use card and [the charge] going from Confirma to Altour to MasterCard, to JPMorgan Chase to Workday, along the way, sometimes stuff drops.”

 

AppZen Customer Advisory Board member

Disappearing data

Modern corporate spending involves a complex dance between multiple systems. A typical transaction might begin in a travel booking tool, flow through a card network, hit the bank’s processing system, and land in the company’s expense platform. At each handoff, critical information vanishes, requiring hours of detective work. Which employee made the purchase? What project should it be charged to? Was this part of a larger travel authorization?

Custom fields carefully configured in one system disappear in another. Employee identifiers that make perfect sense to the travel platform mean nothing to the card processor. Meeting codes for client billing vanish between the booking engine and the expense report. Each lost data point represents time spent hunting through emails, cross-referencing calendars, and making educated guesses about where expenses belong.

As Andrew Aguirre, Corporate Treasurer at T.D. Williamson, shared with one AppZen on Tour crowd, “The data doesn’t lie.” But these teams are struggling just to get that data.

“Some card providers give us per-card files for proper reconciliation, but most don’t, so we’re forced to download data and process it through Excel macros just to do the recon.”

 

AppZen Customer Advisory Board member

The cost of integration workarounds

Faced with these systemic failures, finance teams have been forced to be creative. While one team downloads transaction files from multiple card providers and processes them through elaborate Excel macros, another has built Power BI dashboards that attempt to visualize the chaos. One particularly ambitious group created an automated system that captures travel dates from their booking platform, then automatically links all credit card expenses from those dates to the appropriate meeting numbers.

These innovations are symptoms of desperation. Every customization and jury-rigged integration represents acceptance of a broken system. Worse, these solutions are fragile. A software update or change in file format, or a new team member who doesn’t understand the intricate workarounds, can cause the entire system to collapse. Finance professionals should be analyzing spending trends and identifying savings opportunities, not spending their days playing detective with transaction data. Strategic thinking has taken a backseat to tactical survival, and the opportunity cost is high.

“The beauty of Card Audit is that it allows you to catch things in almost-real time. As soon as a transaction posts, you know if it’s within policy or outside of policy. For example, if someone books business class airfare against company policy, you can reach out to that employee or their manager, remind them of the rule, and there’s usually time for them to go back to the airline, change the ticket, and get that cost lowered. It becomes a big cost avoidance for the company.”

 

Andrew Aguirre
Corporate Treasurer and Senior Director, Global Treasury Services & Credit

T.D. Williamson

The AI shift to strategic operations

Given so many challenges, our customers expressed gratitude for the immediate and measurable impacts of AI on their finance operations. With AppZen Card Audit, they know they’ll catch that business class booking before it becomes a sunk cost, and that policy violations will trigger immediate notifications, eliminating after-the-fact reports. Reconciliation is happening automatically, in real-time, without constant human oversight. There’s no need to replace card programs, change providers, or rebuild policies from scratch. The same audit rules that govern expense reports apply directly to card transactions. 

“If AppZen’s AI is this good, what else can it do?” asked listeners. Our speakers shared additional ways to streamline work and improve compliance, sparking conversations about spending culture that wouldn’t have been possible with traditional reports. A few examples:

Team Insights reveals spending patterns invisible in traditional reports. Managers and finance teams can see when one department’s spend outstrips company policy, enabling targeted discussions based on actual behavior rather than assumptions.

AppZen Inbox with AI Agent Workbench manages AP inbox emails and invoice workflows with intelligent ticketing and standardized vendor communications. Instead of sporadic email exchanges, every invoice verification follows consistent processes, preventing duplicate payments and speeding email responses.

AI Analytics uses predictive analytics to identify problems before they occur. When AI notices unusual patterns, like a sudden spike in declined transactions or multiple bookings for the same trip, it flags issues for investigation before they cascade. More data, better financial strategy.

From symptoms to solutions to strategy

This shift from reactive to proactive management changes everything. Teams address issues as they arise rather than during audit season. Instead of chasing employees for explanations about old transactions, conversations happen while details are fresh. Companies are preventing unauthorized expenses entirely, so there’s no need to write them off. Beyond cost avoidance, organizations using modern card audit solutions report operational improvements that touch every aspect of their financial operations. 

The real transformation happens in how teams spend their time. Finance managers who previously ran monthly fire drills to close the books now have real-time visibility into spend patterns and policy compliance. The conversation with leadership shifts from explaining what went wrong to planning what comes next, for deeper strategic value:

Finance teams gain the ability to answer questions they couldn’t even ask before. Why does one department spend five times more on meals than another? Which vendors consistently cause reconciliation problems? How do spending patterns vary by region, season, or business unit? These insights transform finance from a processing center to a strategic partner.

A new chapter for corporate cards

We’re grateful to the many finance leaders who took time from their demanding schedules to share their insights at our AppZen on Tour events. The candid discussions about the challenges they face and the solutions that are working best for them help the entire finance community move forward. 

Although corporate card programs are not working as well as they should, the problems are solvable. The technology is proven, practical, and surprisingly simple to implement. With the help of advanced AI tools designed for modern spend complexity, corporate card programs can finally deliver on their original promise of simplified spending, enhanced control, and strategic insights.