P-Cards, Stored Value Cards, Travel Cards and ACH payments
On the purchase side, many banks offer credit cards which are enabled to work with specific merchant categories or, non-specific cards which in effect are departmental or individually held corporate credit cards. Similarly many banks now offer stored value cards which can be used to eliminate cash held at locations and to reduce the risk of having high value credit cards in the hands of many employees at each location or department. Organizations will have their own views on the relative merits or credit cards and stored value cards at various levels for various purposes.
In either case, the transaction data provided by the card processor permits almost real time cost of purchase and department budget oversight by managers, by accounting, by Internal Audit and Treasury.
For payment purposes or reimbursement purposes, there is now no reason to continue to issue checks. Most banks offer ACH payment transfers at a fraction of a check's cost. ACH also can be time controlled to facilitate taking discounts, and can dramatically reduce incidence of lost checks, or incorrect addresses or incorrect payees. SVC cards can be an option for payment of frequently used local vendors or occasional help where 1099 reports are required.
For each case credit card, stored value card, ACH payments GRN applications can form the data input linkages or the data output linkages between in-place software applications and banking. These linkages will create the significant savings, improved controls and oversight.
A payment advice, if required, is outputted by the organization's software and GRN follows on by notifying the user by email and on the website. GRNs payment advice memo field contains an unlimited amount of space so large invoices can be aggregated with full detail available to the payee, e.g. utilities.
So it follows then that GRN works closely with key stakeholders within the organization to map processes and to link data feeds and outputs to and from software that is currently in place, leaving room for software upgrades via flexible bridges to and from the software.