What Is Petty Cash? How It Can Hurt Your Business

Petty cash is an outdated process in a digital age. It may work for small businesses with fewer employees, but the larger the company, the more unwieldy the process gets.

So, What is Petty Cash?

Petty cash is a store of money kept in an office to be used on various employee expenditures, typically small items, and logs need to be maintained.

Keeping “cash” around in a business always comes with risk. That cash is supposed to be “petty” — dealt with in small amounts. Unfortunately, the more petty cash transactions you have outside the office, the less petty (or insignificant) — and less manageable — it becomes.

The problems with petty cash are largely embodied in its name.

Accounting With Petty Cash

Your employees need petty cash to make necessary outside purchases, but they have to jump through hoops to deal with it. 

It’s a manual process. Employees have to request the cash, usually by filling out a form. They have to keep it separate from their own cash, and make sure their business and personal expenses don’t intermingle. After making the purchase, they need to get change and a receipt, and hold on to both until they can fill out an expense report. This process has plenty of room for error, and often employees don’t like being held accountable for money kept on their person. 

It’s tempting for companies to use petty cash. Handing employees money rather than a credit card with access to a credit line might seem like a better option – but both solutions are fraught with difficulty. 

Lower the Risk of Fraud

Another con is the lack of control managers have on how petty cash is spent. Bookkeepers devote far too much time to process it. Finance sees it as a cash drain, since they have to budget for more than they’ve projected in order to cover expenses in the field. And for larger expenses — travel, in particular — it’s hopelessly inefficient.

Furthermore, the whole system lends itself to fraud: usually unintentional, such as mistakes or overspending, though sometimes outright. At best, it places your employees in an adversarial position —they act in your interest, yet their actions are inherently suspect. At worst, employees trusted with company money may intentionally abuse their power and spend on personal items. Larger issues, such as embezzlement, are rare. However, leaving the door open to temptation is ill-advised. 

As your business scales up, these problems only grow more pronounced. It’s a system long overdue for replacement.

A Better Solution for Petty Cash

What if you could throw out your entire petty cash system? What if you could give each employee spending freedom, yet control every cent that gets spent? What if you could specify maximum expense amounts, types of acceptable expenses and acceptable places to spend it?

Fortunately, all these things are no longer “what-ifs.” They are not only possible, but also easily affordable for even the smallest businesses. The time and money you save in bookkeeping alone justifies the entire system.

With a PEX Visa® Prepaid Card, you can fund expenses by individual employee function, customer, location, or time of day. You can automatically track expense information for each employee and allocate new funds 24/7, wherever they are in the field.

You can now have unprecedented control over your expenses, eliminating inefficiencies and sharply reducing mistakes and fraudulent spending. Your employees can be relieved of tedious paperwork, burdensome reimbursement procedures and the feeling that their actions may somehow be under suspicion.

It’s the kind of program your whole company can embrace. PEX is a win for everyone.
 

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