Spend control for multi-entity finance
Approve it before the money leaves.
Most spend tools are excellent at telling you what already happened. Stanchion enforces your policy at the moment of authorisation, so the month-end close stops being an investigation.
Median close, down from nineteen, because exceptions are resolved at authorisation.
Share of transactions that need a human review once policy is expressed as code.
Subsidiaries running on one policy set, each with its own local approval chain.
How it works
Policy is either enforceable or it is advice.
A spend policy that can only be checked after settlement is not a control. It is a description of what you would have preferred. Everything below exists to move the decision earlier.
Write the policy once
Category, vendor, amount, entity, cost centre, time of month. Stanchion compiles it into an authorisation rule rather than a PDF that lives in a shared drive.
Enforce it at the card
A transaction outside policy is declined at the network, with the reason returned to the cardholder in plain language and the exception routed to a named approver.
Route the exceptions
Approvers see the transaction, the policy it broke and the three most similar decisions already made. Most exceptions close in under a minute on a phone.
Close against a clean ledger
Because nothing out of policy settled unexamined, the close is a reconciliation rather than an investigation. Every decision retains its approver, timestamp and rationale.
In practice
“Close used to be the three worst weeks of my quarter. It is now a Tuesday.”
Comparison
Where the decision happens.
The distinction that matters is not feature count. It is whether the control acts before or after settlement.
| Stanchion | Card programmes | Expense tools | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Policy enforced at authorisation | Yes | No | No |
| Exception routed to a named human | Yes | Partial | No |
| Per-entity approval chains | Yes | No | Partial |
| Audit trail includes rationale | Yes | No | No |
| Works before the money moves | Yes | No | No |
Comparison describes categories of tooling, not named vendors. Individual products vary.
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