How PEX Helps Middle Market Companies Beat Their Competition

Competing as a middle market company is getting harder. The National Center for the Middle Market reports that fewer companies expect growth in 2024 and the overall growth rate is expected to fall, too.

There are almost as many reasons for this as there are pundits. Inflation. Credit tightening. Labor force participation. And of course, the usual suspects: Small companies nipping at your heels and larger enterprises bearing down.

Here’s how PEX can help you stay as nimble as a small company, while giving you scalable tools to compete like an enterprise.

Watch and Control Spending

When you’re running a small entrepreneurial company, you can stay on top of every penny that every employee spends. That direct oversight, though, needs a rethink when companies grow. It’s impractical, if not impossible, for a small management team to oversee every detail.

PEX lets you build spending oversight and control into your business processes. All our corporate cards and payments systems (including several that are in the works) let you build guardrails around spending.

All spending—even spending by officers and managers—has to adhere to rules you define. You can vary these rules for different roles and individuals and modify them on the fly for special situations and emergencies. But you’re always in control.

What’s more, PEX reports spending in real time. Every purchase or payment triggers a transaction report that immediately appears in your management dashboards. You always know who’s spending, how much they’re spending, and when they spent it.

No solution gives you more visibility into spending and cash flow.

Improve Your Cash Flow and Free Up Capital. 

Chances are, your banking relationships haven’t gotten any easier since Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last year. Large banks are squeezing their middle-market customers and middle-market banks are getting squeezed themselves.

This tightening of credit has had an impact on the entire economy, especially mid-market companies. Harvard Business Review reports lending to mid-market companies has declined nearly 60% over the last year and private equity investment in mid-market companies is trending downward.

In this environment PEX Credit Expense emerges as a breath of fresh air. This service, underwritten without impacting your credit score, gives middle market companies non-revolving credit that they can access through PEX Visa^® Commercial cards and PEX Virtual cards for vendor payments.

You get to run your business on a 30-day float and when the bill comes due, we discount it 1%. Essentially, it’s a no-interest, no-fee credit line and we pay you to use it.

Better Vendor Relationships

Fast pay makes fast friends and in today’s hyper competitive world, you want your vendors to be your friends. But even if you process and pay your bills on time, things can go wrong.

Mail gets delayed. Checks get stolen. ACH payments don’t post until end-of-day (or the next day) and often without attribution. Who needs vendors asking for payments that you already made?

PEX Virtual cards offer a simple, intuitive solution. They combine the simplicity and convenience of charge cards with innovations that make them more secure. There are no physical cards to be lost or stolen.

Payments go through the day you schedule them to go through and clear immediately. PEX also notifies your vendor that the payment has cleared and is in their account, so they have an immediate record of the payment.

And unlike virtual card programs that take weeks or months to set up, you can be up and running on PEX five minutes after your account’s approval.

A/P Automation Made Simple (and Free)

Paperless workflows.Secure payments. Automated bookkeeping. You can’t compete as a middle market company without digitizing back office processes. On most platforms, that means losing days for implementation, integration, and education.

In other words, downtime—a four-letter word for middle market companies. (Actually, two four-letter words, if you want to be technical.)

Which is why you want to automate accounts payable with PEX.

From cloud-based document storage to one-click reconciliations, PEX virtual cards come with the software and tools to save you hours of manual data entry and labor. Customers report that PEX is 5X to 9X more efficient than manual, paper-based reconciliations.

Better still, you can implement it in minutes and learn it just as fast. And being a cloud based solution, there’s no software to buy or fees to install.

And that takes us to another four-letter word you won’t hear while you switch to PEX: cost.

Improved Employee Morale

Speaking of four-letter words, you wouldn’t want children to hear what middle market employees say about expense reimbursement processes. They’re usually not so polite as:

“Why are they questioning that charge?”

“Two hours to do an expense report and they throw it back at me!?!”

“They still haven’t gotten me a check and my credit card bill’s due.”

PEX helps eliminate this friction.

PEX corporate cards can be programmed to allow only approved spending. (See above.) In fact, you can keep the card turned off and useless, enabling it for pre-approved purchases and amounts. If you wish, you can automate processes around these approvals with the PEX API.

PEX auto-generates transaction records. Users may only have supply tags (selected from a dropdown menu) and/or notes, and submit receipts (through a text or app). This system queues up transactions for approval and self-populates expense reports. 

No more questionable charges. No more headaches. No more reimbursement effort or issues.

Pro Tip: Use PEX Disburse cards to reward and incentivize employees. They’re more secure and flexible than ordinary gift cards. And bonusing an employee who goes the extra mile can be as easy as tapping a few keys and radio buttons on a mobile app.

How Can PEX Make Your Company More Competitive?

Middle market companies have always been resilient, accounting for 40% of the U.S. workforce and gross domestic product (GDP).Those that succeed use solutions that combine the best of a small company’s flexibility and a large company’s scalability. Solution’s like PEX. Request a live PEX demo today.