If your business issues corporate cards to ten or more employees, you have a programme large enough for systematic policy leakage to go undetected under manual review. SpendGuard runs inside your existing Microsoft 365 environment — your transaction data never leaves your tenant — and the fastest way to understand your exposure is a free three-month health check.
How corporate card monitoring works
Corporate card monitoring scores every transaction against a defined set of rules the moment it posts. Those rules cover spend limits and approval thresholds from your card policy, merchant category codes associated with personal or prohibited spend, FBT-relevant transaction types such as entertainment and meals, approved and unapproved vendor lists, and behavioural fraud signals such as velocity anomalies and transaction splitting patterns.
When a transaction breaches one or more rules — or generates a composite fraud risk score above a configured threshold — it is flagged for finance team review with full context: the transaction details, why it was flagged, the risk score, and the cardholder's recent transaction history. Every flag, decision, and resolution is logged in an audit trail.
How it differs from monthly reconciliation
Monthly reconciliation reviews spend after it has already occurred. A finance team member reviews transactions from a bank statement or expense system export — typically looking for amounts that seem unusual or vendors they do not recognise. There is no automated baseline, no pattern comparison, and no systematic flagging.
The result is that manual reconciliation catches a fraction of the anomalies that exist. Split transactions designed to sit just below approval thresholds are invisible to a reviewer who cannot see all of a cardholder's transactions simultaneously. Entertainment spend with missing FBT documentation looks like any other expense. A cardholder charging personal groceries once a month for a year is effectively invisible until the pattern is large enough to notice.
Real-time monitoring does not replace human judgement. It replaces the search. Your finance team reviews exceptions the system has already identified as needing attention — rather than looking for the needle in the haystack manually.
What SpendGuard monitors
SpendGuard runs four detection modules against every transaction. Policy Checker covers spend limits, approved merchant categories, and approval matrix compliance. FBT Detector identifies entertainment and meal transactions subject to FBT and captures attendee counts and business purpose at point of expense. Fraud Scoring assigns a 0–100 risk score built on velocity anomalies, after-hours patterns, and splitting signatures. Supplier Check flags new or unregistered vendors before spend continues.
SpendGuard is a managed service — SecureLoop operates it, and your team uses the dashboards and alerts. The detection engine runs in SecureLoop's Azure tenant; your transaction data stays in your Microsoft 365 environment at all times.
Does your business need it?
If your business issues corporate cards to ten or more employees, you have a programme large enough for systematic policy leakage to go undetected under manual review. If any of your card spend includes entertainment, meals, or client-related expenses, you have FBT exposure that the ATO is in a position to identify through data matching. And if you have not recently confirmed that your spend policy is actually being enforced — not just documented — you are operating on trust rather than evidence.
SpendGuard starts at $599 per month for up to 20 cardholders. The fastest way to assess whether it is worth it for your business is to let us run your card data and show you what is there.
Frequently asked questions
What is the minimum business size for corporate card monitoring to make sense?
Businesses with ten or more cardholders start to exceed what manual review can reliably cover. Below that threshold, a careful monthly review may be sufficient. Above it, the transaction volume and the number of cardholder behaviour patterns to track make automated monitoring significantly more reliable than manual checks alone.
Does SpendGuard require new Microsoft licences?
No. SpendGuard is built on Microsoft 365 and Power BI. Most businesses with 20 or more employees operating on Microsoft 365 Business Standard or higher already have everything needed. Licence requirements are confirmed during the free health check.
How long does setup take?
Standard onboarding is 30 days across four phases: connection and data validation in week one, policy configuration and baseline calibration in week two, Power BI deployment and alert configuration in week three, and team training and go-live in week four. Setup fee is $3,500 fixed price.
What happens when a transaction is flagged?
Flagged transactions generate an alert with full context — the transaction details, why it was flagged, the risk score, and the cardholder's transaction history. Your finance team reviews the alert in Power BI or via email or Teams notification, then marks it as legitimate, requiring follow-up, or escalated. Every decision is logged in the audit trail.
Start with the free health check
Export three months of corporate card transactions from your expense system or bank portal as a CSV. We run it through the SpendGuard engine and return a plain-English report showing your FBT exposure estimate, policy breach count, fraud risk flags, and new vendor exposure. No software to install. No commitment required.