Zip Launches Virtual Cards to Accelerate Vendor Payments and Deliver Immediate Savings

Businesses Can Now Seamlessly Use Corporate Cards in Workflows from Intake to Pay to Relieve Payment Bottlenecks and Create Unparalleled Spend Visibility

SAN FRANCISCO--()--Zip, the world’s leading intake-to-procure platform, today launched Zip Vendor Cards, an advanced corporate card solution that enables rapid vendor payments while strengthening control and visibility into spend. Zip Vendor Cards is purpose-built for easy adoption by employees, so businesses can effortlessly issue virtual cards for recurring and one-time purchases. Leveraging Zip’s best-in-class no-code workflow platform, finance and accounts payable (AP) teams can create virtual cards with one click for one-off purchases or automatically generate cards from workflows based on approval conditions such as purchase price, spend category or vendor. In tandem with Zip’s industry-leading Intake-to-Procure solution, Zip Vendor Cards gives businesses a unified, highly compliant solution to automate purchase requests and approvals from initial intake to issuing payment.

Efficiency is essential in today’s economy, yet businesses can’t afford to jeopardize accuracy or compliance for the sake of speed. That’s why we’re making it easy for our customers to streamline their payments processes with our intuitive, highly compliant Vendor Cards solution,” said Rujul Zaparde, co-founder and CEO of Zip. “Zip Vendor Cards, in combination with Intake-to-Procure or Intake-to-Pay, safely accelerates the entire procurement process via flexible intake and approval workflows, so finance teams can spend less time manually processing payments and more time analyzing and optimizing their spend. Vendor Cards is the next step in a long line of Zip innovations aimed at creating easy-to-use experiences that modernize spend controls for employees as well as for finance and procurement teams.”

Zip Vendor Cards delivers speed and convenience for employees while providing finance and procurement teams a central platform to maintain their card programs. Business users can leverage Zip Intake-to-Procure to initiate and collaborate on vendor approval processes. Once all necessary cross-functional approvals are completed, the Zip platform can automatically issue single-purpose virtual cards and log general ledger (GL) codes and other accounting information directly in the business’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Business users can instantly use virtual cards after creation, and the finance and accounting teams who authorized the card can maintain complete control over spending limits and merchant categories, as well as easily freeze and unfreeze cards or transfer ownership when cardholders move roles. What’s more, Zip Vendor Cards, one of numerous options supported on Zip for global payments methods, delivers immediate savings discounts on vendor spend through cash back rewards.

Most importantly, Zip’s virtual cards are incredibly easy for employees and finance teams to adopt. Employees follow the same intuitive intake and approval workflows they use for larger or more complex purchase requests, so they get a no-training-required interface and seamless intake-to-pay experience. Plus, because intake is easy for employees to adopt, collection of required purchase, vendor and payment information is all completed upfront, so finance team approvers can immediately validate, approve and generate virtual cards knowing they have strong controls in place.

Our employees have adopted Zip’s virtual cards so easily,” said Monette Quintanilla, accounting manager at Instabase. “That’s where we’ve had the largest wins — if our employees didn’t adopt it, then we would be back to doing the whole payment approval process manually.”

Additional features of Zip Vendor Cards include:

  • Best-in-class approval engine: Vendor Cards leverages Zip’s intelligent workflows and powerful process orchestration to streamline complex, cross-functional approvals. Teams can leverage pre-built workflows or adapt workflows themselves with a flexible, no-code experience.
  • Simplified accounting: Zip Vendor Cards collects coding and vendor information from intake, so all transactions are automatically coded and reviewed before they get to finance. Zip also allows the setup of multiple entities in accounting, which saves the pain of inter-company transfers.
  • User-friendly receipt handling: Zip allows admins to configure what type of transactions require receipts based on transaction amount. Additionally, cardholders can simply forward a receipt via email, saving them the time to download and upload documents.
  • One-click card creation: Zip Vendor Cards offers maximum ease of use for employees — just one click will generate an active card that they can use immediately. Each card for employees will be tied to the Zip request for complete audit and approval details. Admins can also easily create one-off cards with one click.
  • Automated ERP integrations: Zip provides industry-leading integrations and sync capabilities for leading ERP solutions. When a bill is approved, Zip will automatically sync approvals to a user’s ERP system. Once paid, the transaction record will also be synced.
  • Advanced controls to mitigate business risk: Zip Vendor Cards allows procurement teams to set deep controls, including by time limit, amount and merchant category. Zip also partners with Stripe for state of the art fraud detection and prevention, automatically rejecting suspicious transactions. These controls ensure that all transactions are as intended, saving companies money and time in dealing with unwanted spend. Zip will also proactively notify admins of any cards tied to employees who leave the company, so admins can quickly deactivate the card or transfer ownership to another employee.

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About Zip

Zip is the world’s leading intake-to-procure platform. Providing an intuitive starting point for any employee to initiate a purchase or vendor request, Zip helps businesses gain clear and timely visibility across all business spend by dramatically improving the employee experience. The platform’s no-code configuration and intelligent workflows integrate disparate systems, enabling businesses to automatically route requests for faster approval across finance, legal, procurement, IT, security and other teams. Zip consolidates all the steps and tools used across finance and procurement processes in one platform. Leading enterprises and high-growth startups like Northwestern Mutual, Snowflake, Canva, Airtable, Webflow, Databricks, along with more than 200 others, use Zip to streamline their intake-to-pay processes while delighting their business users.

Contacts

Kelsey LaBarbera
Bhava Communications for Zip
zip@bhavacom.com
+1 (707) 812-1230

Contacts

Kelsey LaBarbera
Bhava Communications for Zip
zip@bhavacom.com
+1 (707) 812-1230