Float Financial: How Does It Work?

Tracking your expenses is one of the most important aspects of running a successful business, but it can also be one of the most complicated.

Float Financial has designed its products and systems to improve and streamline the way Canadian businesses manage their expenses, striving to enable businesses and teams as a whole to spend effortlessly.

In this article, we examine what Float Financial offers and how you can use its products to save time and money.

What Is Float Financial?

Float Financial is a Canadian business financing platform that offers corporate credit cards and partnered IT solutions to create a holistic expense management system.

They allow you to pay your expenses, reimburse your employees, organize your finances and much more, all while earning up to 4% on the money you hold in your account and 1% cash back on your business credit cards.

How Does Float Financial Work?

To get started with Float Financial, you can visit the Float Financial website and create a free account.

From there, you can quickly access the business credit cards and key expense management features offered, including vendor payments, employee reimbursements, expense tracking, CAD and USD currency conversion, and earnings from a high-yield account.

Once you’ve created a Float account, you need to connect it to one of your business bank accounts to load funds and start spending.

From there, you can integrate your Float account with your business accounting software (such as QuickBooks Online, Xero, or NetSuite), and easily track business and employee expenses and reimbursements using the business credit cards and system integration.

Float’s systems also allow you to control spending, keep an eye on what’s happening through reports and data, and use features to automate tasks, saving you time and effort.

How Much Does it Cost?

As a Float Financial customer, you have a choice of three membership tiers:

With the Essentials and Professional tiers being the most popular, let’s take a closer look at what each offers.

Essentials Tier

At the Essentials tier, you will get the following:

Professional Tier

The Professional tier includes everything in the Essentials tier, plus

Don’t forget that you’ll also have to pay transaction fees at both levels above, starting at $1 per transaction, for bill payments and reimbursements. You’ll find more details on this part of the pricing in Float Financial’s article on its fee schedules.

Float Financial Products and Services

Float Financial started by offering Canadian dollar business credit cards in 2021, and has now expanded to offer a suite of products, services, and platform integrations to support finance teams and expense management in general.

Float’s five key products and services that integrate into its platform are:

These five offerings can be used in tandem with the system’s other features and integration options to create an all-in-one expense management solution for your business.

Business Credit Card

Float Financial’s best-known product is its business credit card, offered in CAD and USD as either a prefunded card or a charge card.

With Float’s CAD and USD prefunded cards, your card limit equals your bank account balance. Through their system, you can connect multiple business bank accounts (in CAD and USD) to fund your business expenses. You can also set up automatic reloads to ensure your funds are always available when you need them.

If you prefer, you can apply for the Float charge card unsecured, which offers a credit limit of up to $1,000,000, with a credit term of 15 or 30 days.

Both types of cards allow you to enjoy useful benefits, such as

Bill Payments

Float Financial’s bill payment product offers you a new, more integrated way to manage your accounts payable process, including receiving invoices, payment, and reconciliation.

Through their system, your invoices are automatically tracked and categorized, and you can add additional automations to simplify the approval process, payments, and more.

You can then pay your vendors directly from Float, with payments typically processed in one business day.

Reimbursements

With Float’s employee reimbursement system, you can quickly and easily reimburse personal expenses without employees having to enter every data point, and without having to collect a pile of paper receipts.

Employees can simply submit a photo of the receipt for the requested reimbursement, and Float’s system (with your input) will direct the request through the appropriate approval process. Once expenses are approved, your finance team can review the information and send payments directly from your Float balance to the employee concerned.

High-Yield Accounts

If you bank with a traditional bank, chances are your money is sitting in a low-yield checking account. If you’d prefer your money to work a little harder for you, you can earn up to 4% on the funds you keep in your Float account (for balances between $25,000 and $1,000,000). If your balance is less than $25,000, you’ll get a 2.5% return.

It’s nice to note that these rates of return are good for funds in both CAD and USD, and there’s no need to lock up your money for a specific period—you can move it as you want, when you want.

Currency Conversion

For businesses that operate in both Canadian and US dollars, the ability to convert funds between the two currencies without spending a fortune on fees is extremely valuable.

By using Float Financial to convert your Canadian and US dollars, you’ll benefit from conversion rates lower than those offered by almost all traditional banks, and you won’t need to maintain a USD account.

Additionally, this service allows you to pay in USD, issue USD credit cards, and send automated clearing house payments and USD wire transfers to vendors and reimburse US-based employees, all without having a USD account.

Conclusion

Float Financial’s business credit cards and expense management system can help you organize and streamline your finances, saving you time and money.

If you run a business in Canada and are looking for an alternative to traditional bank business credit cards, it’s worth exploring Float’s products and services.

If Float’s products aren’t right for you, consider discovering other ways to earn rewards on your business spending through our recommendations on the best business credit cards, which offer a wide range of benefits for business owners.

Also be sure to read our complete review of Loop Financial, which offers similar products and services for businesses.

Frequently Asked Questions