Gergø Poteczki Turulsen
Marketing Manager
Tags
Subscriptions
Date of publication
May 17, 2023
Reading time
5 minutes
The use of subscriptions and recurring payments is at an all-time high and is forecast to grow even more. For enterprises, it is crucial to manage these services in a compliant way.
Mazepay ensures a secure subscription and recurring payment management with each virtual card locked to a subscription.
When we created Mazepay, security and compliance were among the essential things, which is why approval before purchase plays a vital role in our solution. What would a pre-approved amount mean if it could be spent on anything? Theoretically, a plastic card with a higher spend amount for multiple charges can be exploited. That is why Mazepay is built on the infrastructure of virtual cards. When a recurring virtual card is issued, it will be locked to that subscription(*) after the first charge, meaning it cannot be used for other spend.
Besides compliance, this has many other advantages; e.g. transparency and easy management.
(*) When talking about a virtual card being locked to a subscription, we discuss SaaS subscription services, social media campaign accounts, cloud service accounts or merchants. Different providers have different ways of handling payments; we identified four use cases, which we will explain in detail. For simplicity, we use the term subscription as an umbrella term for the different use cases.
One virtual card, one subscription. Software-as-a-service purchases remain within the approved budget; new items and services can only be purchased with another approval. The virtual cards cannot be handed over to colleagues for additional items or purchases.
Finance can easily match the transactions with the ongoing services, identify subscription owners, and move ownership or cancel a subscription.
Setting budgets for teams, employees, or campaigns is easy with spend limits and the card's expiry date. It is easy to see spend, revoke cards and allocate resources from one campaign or team to another.
For the best user experience, we collected some best practices and selected some use cases to help you get the most out of Mazepay.
A convenient and broadly used model for software and other digital services. Many businesses use them; however, they are only easy to follow and control with the right tools. You can easily control this convenient model with virtual cards supported by Mazepay's end-to-end process.
Depending on annual or monthly charges, and team or individual subscriptions, we recommend the following way of requesting and using the cards to remain compliant.
The best way is to request a single-use card, as this is a single annual payment.
We recommend requesting recurring virtual cards for the planned period. Be mindful that the virtual cards will expire after twelve months.
Running campaigns on different social media platforms is a must for almost every company. Navigating between the payments, however, can take time and effort.
Social media billing is usually set up with the option of adding one payment method at a time for an account; this can interfere with the approvals, so we recommend creating separate accounts for each parallel ongoing campaign for the most compliant use and transparency. This way, the cards can be used as budgeting tools; each campaign only runs until their spend limit has been reached and can be stopped by revoking the card.
Here we break down the two most used platforms individually:
In the LinkedIn campaign manager for one LinkedIn ad account, only one payment method can be added. However, you can create multiple LinkedIn ad accounts for the same LinkedIn page.
Each LinkedIn ad account can have its own payment method added, so we recommend creating an ad account for each running campaign, that way, their spend can be easily controlled.
Resources:https://www.linkedin.com/campaignmanager/accounts/new
In the Meta ads manager, you can add multiple payment methods for one Facebook ad account. However, in these cases you need to choose a default payment method, and that will be charged for each campaign. When it cannot be charged, the other methods work as a fallback.
Each Facebook ad account can have its own default payment method added, so we recommend creating an ad account for each ongoing campaign, that way, their spend can be easily controlled.
Resources:https://m.facebook.com/help/132073386867900https://m.facebook.com/help/105373712886516
Similar to social media platforms, we recommend creating individual accounts, but here, for each service. Cloud providers often have different merchants for each service, meaning that one card already locked to a service cannot be used for the same provider's other services.
We break it down into two examples below:
In Google Cloud, you can set up several accounts for different services. For this, Access Management Roles can be used.
We recommend for each role and each service and their renewals request an individual multi-use card.
Resources:https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/payment-methods
For AWS, we recommend setting up individual payment profiles for each service and requesting individual multi-use cards for these.
Resources:https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/manage-paymentprofiles.html
The final category is none periodical billing, delivery services, volume-based billing, etc. We recommend requesting a recurring virtual card for each individual service, set up with a spend limit that matches the expectations of the period.
Last updated
November 27, 2024
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