One of the most common components of a B2B commerce platform is payment flexibility. Depending on your project or account’s specific needs, you ultimately need to ensure you can extend the most flexible payment options possible. Out of the box, your Liftoff platform supports many flexible payment options including credit card, points, open account/monthly billing statement, and special discounts. While these are excellent options, did you know that Liftoff has a native feature that supports managing spending accounts for your clients? In this spotlight, we’re going to dive into one of Liftoff’s most powerful and flexible payment methods: “Budgets.”
What does Liftoff’s Budgets feature do?
Our Budgets feature allows you to create spending accounts for your organization in order to track history, set usage limits and patterns, define automatic application, assign budget TTL, and so much more. Budgets are most commonly implemented in scenarios where you want to enable company-funded employee spending and need to enforce rules around purchasing and utilization. This feature allows you to set up budgets for individual employees and also enables you to establish pooled spending accounts that can be leveraged by a team.
Budgets you create can be configured to be stackable, meaning you may combine the application of multiple budgets within a single transaction. This feature can also be configured to work in conjunction with credit card or open account payment, allowing extended flexibility when ordering.
Case study: Independent Marketing Alliance (IMA)
IMA is a network of some of the largest foodservice distribution companies in North America, including well-known manufacturers such as Tyson, Sara Lee, Kellogg's, and Conagra among many others. They provide supplier management, exclusive brand marketing, business planning, quality assurance, and many other vital management services.
To aid in the distribution of branded merchandise that services this network, IMA established a Liftoff portal through subscriber npn360 who provides streamlined product manufacturing and fulfillment. Each of the food service suppliers in their network has been provided role-based access into this portal to place on-demand orders to enable marketing product dispensation.
“Managing programs of this magnitude requires strict adherence to spend, and IMA wanted a process that was intuitive and easy to manage,” said Lisa West, Senior Account Director for npn360. “Liftoff’s Budget feature allows us to provide each supplier a set allotment of money that can be used toward the purchase of marketing products. With automated budget payment application, the platform has greatly improved the user experience for IMA’s suppliers, making this a very popular feature,” she concluded.
Adding automation and integration to your budgets can take you to new heights!
If you or your client utilize a platform for managing employee points, recognition, or spend, chances are you may be able to create an integration that ties your data into Liftoff. By combining our OData Rest API and a no-code platform such as Zapier, you can craft workflows that automate the delivery and synchronization of data between Liftoff and your employee system. If you are interested in learning more about this use case, subscriber Eric Granata, CTO of Brand Fuel, details a no-code solution he developed for one of his clients in the pilot episode of Conversations in Commerce.
Want to learn more about budgets?
Additional information about our Budgets feature can be found in our online documentation. As always, you may reach out to your account manager for more information and tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of this powerful feature.
