Handing out cards was the right call. Not looking at what got bought with them — that was the mistake.

If you use Mercury, Brex, Revolut or anything similar, you've probably done the modern thing: issued virtual cards to employees or team leads so people can grab the tools they need without a procurement ritual. I did the same, and I still think it's right — speed matters more than control at that stage.

But a year later I actually read the statement. We were paying for ChatGPT Plus five times — five personal $20 subscriptions on five different cards. Two Canva Pros. Three transcription tools that all did the same thing. Nobody did anything wrong: each person solved their own problem with the card they were given. The company just never saw the whole picture in one place.

The math nobody runs

Five personal ChatGPT Plus seats: $100/month. One Team plan for the same five people: $125/month with admin controls, shared workspace, and — crucially — seats you can reassign when someone leaves, instead of a personal account that walks out the door with them. Sometimes the group plan is cheaper outright; almost always it's cheaper per unit of control. And with annual group pricing, the gap usually gets wider.

The reason companies don't consolidate isn't laziness. It's that consolidation requires knowing what you have — how many subscriptions, on whose cards, at what price, renewing when. That inventory doesn't exist in your banking app, because the bank sees five unrelated $20 charges, not “the same product, five times.”

Visibility first, then the easy wins

The fix is boring and that's why it works. Get every subscription into one list — pulled from vendor emails and bank statements, matched by product, not by card. Sort by vendor. Every duplicate becomes obvious in about a minute of scrolling, and each one is a five-minute email: “we're moving to a team plan, here's your invite.”

This was one of the first things we built into Subscope, because it's the fastest money most companies ever find: connect your corporate email, get the inventory in ten minutes, and the duplicates surface themselves. On average, companies overpay by more than 25% for software they don't fully use — and consolidating personal subscriptions into team plans is usually the first and easiest slice of that.

Keep the cards. Keep the speed. Just add the one thing the cards can't give you: a single screen where the same product bought five times looks exactly as absurd as it is.