How distributed teams manage expenses with virtual cards

When your designers are in Lagos, your developers are in Bangalore, your marketing lead is in Lisbon, and your finance manager is in Toronto, managing expenses across such a distributed team might be complicated.  The usual approach of handing out a company card and collecting receipts at the end of the month, as in physical offices, doesn’t work when the team is spread across the globe.

Distributed teams definitely need better ways to manage expenses across board, and virtual cards seem like a promising solution. How virtual cards fit into that system? Can they solve this problem effectively? This article explains how distributed teams can manage their expenses with virtual cards.

What are the problems distributed teams face when managing expenses?

Before we show you how virtual cards work for distributed teams, it is important to understand the scope of the problem.

• Access barriers: Imagine a physical card stuck with the CEO in Berlin, while a marketer in Manila tries to pay for a software subscription at midnight. The purchase either gets delayed or someone uses their personal card and submits a claim later.
• Reimbursement problems: Employees pay bills on personal accounts, then wait days or weeks for reimbursement. The accounting team ends up with cash-flow disruptions, piles of receipts, and endless reconciliation work.
• Oversight and security headaches: Issuing multiple physical cards across countries makes tracking who spent what, when, and whether it was approved nearly impossible. Cards get lost, compromised, or misused. Replacing them across borders is a logistical nightmare.
• Currency conversion issues: A distributed team spends in multiple currencies. When accounting, the company would have to convert each local purchase back to its base currency at the card network’s prevailing rate at the time of the transaction. This already sounds like an accounting nightmare.

This is why virtual cards make a lot of sense. But are virtual cards really a magic bullet for international teams?

Also read: How to pay for ads easily with your Grey card

What is a virtual card, and how does it work?

A virtual card is a payment card that exists entirely in digital form. It has a card number, an expiry date, and a CVV, exactly like a physical card. Still, it is issued instantly, managed through software, and can be created, modified, or cancelled without any physical infrastructure involved.

The payment process with virtual cards is the same as with physical cards. When a team member uses a virtual card to pay for a Figma subscription or a Google Workspace licence, the card network (Visa or Mastercard, depending on the issuing platform) sends an authorisation request to the issuing institution. The institution checks whether the transaction is permitted on the card and approves or declines in real time. This should be done within minutes or a couple of days.

What can you do with a virtual card?

Virtual cards give you more control, which comes in handy when managing a distributed team. Here are some things you can set on a virtual card:

• Spending limits. Each virtual card can be issued with a maximum spend per transaction, per day, or per month. A card issued to a freelance designer for paying Figma has a $20 monthly limit. A card issued for running Facebook Ads campaigns has a $5,000 monthly limit. Neither card can be used to spend beyond those limits, regardless of who holds it, unless it is reviewed.
• Merchant category locking. Most virtual card platforms let you restrict a card to specific merchant category codes (MCCs), which are the classification codes assigned to every business type by card networks. A card created for software subscriptions can be locked to the MCC codes for software and SaaS. If a transaction is initiated from a restaurant or retail store, it will be declined automatically because the card’s configuration prevents it.
• Single-use cards. For one-off purchases, such as a team member booking a flight ticket, a single-use virtual card can be generated. This card is used once and automatically cancelled. The card number is useless after the transaction completes, so it cannot be used fraudulently even if it is intercepted or exposed in a data breach.
• Recurring subscription cards. This is the direct opposite of single-use cards. You can link a card to recurring expenses, such as subscriptions. One can be a card for Notion and another for Slack or the team’s design tool. If any of those subscriptions is cancelled or the service provider is changed, the card is cancelled without affecting any other card in the system. More than you realise, many teams keep paying for subscriptions they no longer need, which can be avoided by using dedicated cards for recurring costs.
• Real-time visibility. Every transaction on every virtual card is displayed on the platform’s dashboard as it happens, without waiting for a monthly statement or financial report. This means errors can be detected in real time and sorted immediately.

Also read: How virtual cards can simplify your life abroad

How can distributed teams set up their virtual cards?

The way a team structures its virtual cards depends on team size, spending volume, and the degree of freedom individual team members have over work expenses.

• Per-person cards: Each team member receives their own virtual card with a monthly spending limit tailored to their role and budget. A developer might have $200 per month for tools and learning resources. A marketing manager might have $2,000 per month for ads and marketing software. This approach works well for teams where individuals manage their own tooling.
• Per-project cards: A single virtual card is created for each active project, depending on the budget. All spending related to that project is charged to that card. At the end of the project, the card is cancelled, and the spending is reconciled against the project budget.
• Service cards: You can have one card per recurring vendor. All work-related tools and services from Notion and Slack to AWS, GitHub, Figma, and Loom can get their own card with the exact subscription amount as the limit. This removes the risk of vendor overcharging and makes subscriptions easier to manage. If you want to cancel a subscription, you can cancel the card.
• Contractor cards: When a contractor is hired for a specific project and needs to make purchases on the company’s behalf, like paying for tools or running ads, they can be issued a virtual card with a defined budget and a defined expiry date. The card stops working once the project is completed or the budget is exhausted.

Managing foreign exchange problems with virtual cards

Distributed teams spend in multiple currencies, which creates a cost that is easy to underestimate when it is buried in card network conversion rates.

When a virtual card denominated in USD is used to pay for a subscription charged in EUR, the card network applies a foreign exchange conversion at the time of the transaction. Most card networks apply the Visa or Mastercard daily rate, which typically has a 1% to 1.5% markup above the mid-market rate. On top of that, the card issuing platform may add a cross-border transaction fee of 1% to 3%.

On a single $50 subscription, a 2.5% markup costs $1.25. While this might seem small, in the long run, across teams and campaigns, the cost might turn out significant.

A solution for high-volume distributed teams is to keep money in the currencies they use for payments and issue cards that draw from those balances rather than converting during payments. If a card is being funded from an EUR balance to pay EUR subscriptions, there is no conversion or conversion markup.

Maximising virtual cards across teams

Virtual cards solve a lot of problems for dispersed teams. But they still have their limitations. The company still needs to put measures in place to maximise the benefits and avoid loopholes.

• Receipts: It is still important to collect receipts to help the finance team balance their accounting books and manage tax deductions.
• Approvals: Even when cardholders can initiate transactions, approvals should still be in place. Teams that need pre-approval workflows where a manager signs off before a purchase is made, rather than reviewing it after.
• Regular reviews: While it is easy to track spending across cards on most platforms, it can only work if someone is actually looking at it. Regularly review card spending against budgets and check for unused subscriptions, inconsistent transactions, and budget excesses.

Virtual card options for distributed teams

Here are some of the top virtual card recommendations for distributed teams managing international payments:

• Airwallex: built for businesses that spend internationally. It issues virtual USD, EUR, and GBP cards, supports multi-currency accounts in over 23 currencies, and integrates with major accounting platforms. The foreign exchange rates are competitive relative to traditional bank cards. It is primarily designed for businesses rather than individuals, which makes it better suited to teams with formal company structures.
• Deel: manages contractor payments and expense cards for distributed teams in a single platform. For teams already using Deel for international payroll, the expense card functionality extends naturally from the same infrastructure.
• Brex/Ramp: are US-based corporate card platforms that have expanded their virtual card capabilities significantly. Both offer per-card limits, merchant restrictions, and real-time visibility. International use is more limited outside the US market, and both require a US entity for full access.
• Grey: a FinCEN and FINTRAC-regulated payment platform that issues a virtual Visa card that connects directly to your available Grey multi-currency account (USD, EUR, and GBP). When a transaction is initiated, such as the engineering team paying for AWS cloud hosting in GBP, the card automatically debits the GBP currency balance, without requiring a manual top-up beforehand. The card supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, which means contactless payments online and in-store. Users can create multiple virtual cards for different purposes with their own limits and settings.

Manage international spending with Grey

Grey’s virtual card gives individuals and distributed team members a card that draws directly from a multicurrency balance rather than converting from a local currency at the point of purchase. This avoids top-ups and conversion markups. It takes only a few minutes to get a Grey virtual card:

• Install the Grey app and create your account.
• Complete the KYC verification.
• Navigate to ‘Cards’ and select ‘Virtual Card’.
• Follow the prompts and agree to terms.
• Fund your account to complete the request. A one-time creation fee of $5 is typical ($4 for the card and $1 credited to the balance)

Grey cards are secure with built-in 3DS protection and encryption, ensuring you verify transactions yourself, automatically flag suspicious activity, and prevent fraudulent transactions. It works with Google Pay and Apple Pay for online and contactless payments.

Grey offers a unique way for distributed teams to manage expenses with a virtual card that simplifies cross-border payments. Download the app today to get started and create your cards.

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