Most commercial card pitches are built on whatever a client chooses to share. Here’s what changes when the data comes straight from their books instead.
A card sales specialist sizing up a prospect is almost always working from the same handful of inputs. It usually includes whatever the client chooses to disclose, a competitor’s card statement if the client has one, and the relationship manager’s read on the client, built up over months or years of conversations. None of these inputs were designed to answer the questions a card pitch actually depends on, though.
The missing info means teams can waste months chasing deals that will never close, pitching the wrong branch of a business, or pushing rebate perks when a pitch focused on extra cash flow is more likely to win the deal.
Client accounting data fixes this. It comes straight from real, day-to-day transaction records instead of rough guesses or high-level summaries. Here are five things card teams miss when they don’t have it.
Whether a client is actually a good fit for your program
An uncomfortable truth in commercial card sales is that some clients will never be strong candidates for your program. But, without early visibility into supplier-level spending, teams can spend months pursuing accounts that are unlikely to convert while overlooking smaller, higher-potential opportunities. That blind spot starts with the data teams are working from in the first place.
Client-submitted data varies widely in quality. Sometimes they give you a single annual AP number that lumps together payroll, rent, taxes, and actual cardable spend. Other times they hand over detailed vendor reports. The problem is you’re entirely at the mercy of what the client decides (or knows how) to share.
It’s worth being honest here. Accounting data doesn’t offer the kind of detail that’s completely impossible to get anywhere else. A sufficiently motivated client could hand over a vendor-level file with a similar level of detail. The difference is that accounting data offers that detail by default. It’s the source system behind any vendor report anyway, and it’s there whether the client fills out your spreadsheet or not. A card team working from that view can size up a client’s real potential before investing weeks in a pitch that a proper vendor breakdown would have ruled out on day one.
How the client is currently paying their suppliers
To understand a client’s cardable opportunity, you first need to know how suppliers are being paid today. But getting a full, accurate picture of that is surprisingly difficult.
As part of a commercial card conversation, clients typically provide only their total annual accounts payable spend, or, at best, a high-level category breakdown. Even when finance teams share a more comprehensive vendor list, payment method data is often missing because it’s most commonly a blank field in the accounting system.
Turning to competitor statements instead presents the opposite problem. They’re detailed, but only for the slice of spend that’s already on card, offering little visibility into the broader accounts payable landscape.
Client accounting data in isolation is not a complete answer either. Most accounting systems weren’t designed to store payment methods as a clean, standardized field, and data quality varies significantly across platforms. What these systems do hold, however, is a rich record of invoices, vendors, and transaction activity over time. By analyzing those patterns, it’s possible to infer payment methods with a high degree of confidence, even when they were never explicitly recorded. Tools like Codat’s Payment Method Inference exist to do exactly that work.
Which business entity holds the spend
In large organizations, spend is often spread across subsidiaries and regional entities, each with its own AP processes and, in some cases, banking relationships.
What gets shared with the bank as part of a card conversation is usually a consolidated AP figure, which hides important differences between entities. For example, a company with $200 million in AP spend may have most of its card opportunity concentrated in just a few subsidiaries, while the rest is dispersed across entities with limited conversion potential.
This causes sales teams to get the overall size of the opportunity largely right, but target the wrong part of the company, using a one-size-fits-all pitch when each entity needs a tailored approach.
Accounting data keeps entity and subsidiary structures clear, showing you exactly where the best opportunities live.
The exact float benefit for the client
Card pitches tend to focus heavily on rebate potential, mostly because it’s easy to calculate from standard data. Working capital benefits can be just as compelling, but sales teams may skip them because they’re harder to measure.
Paying with a card instead of a check gives clients extra time to hold onto their cash. Exactly how much that’s worth to a business depends on their current payment terms and due dates, details you rarely have during an initial pitch.
Accounting data fills in those blanks. Bills and due dates show what’s owed and when, while payment trends show real payment habits. This lets you show clients precisely how many extra days of cash flow they gain by switching suppliers to card.
For a business focused on cash flow, hearing “moving these vendors to card frees up $180,000 for six extra days each month” is much more persuasive than a standard rebate pitch.
Which suppliers to target first
Once you’ve identified a promising client, the right subsidiary, and know how they currently pay their suppliers, the next big question is which suppliers to convert first. When a business works with hundreds of vendors, pursuing every target is just impractical.
Traditionally, commercial card teams rely on one of two strategies to rank vendors:
- Ranking by total spend: Teams prioritize the vendors receiving the highest payment volumes. However, transaction size doesn’t reflect card acceptance capability. A team might spend months chasing a $2 million account that can’t accept card while ignoring high-probability, smaller targets.
- Ranking by established card acceptance: Teams focus exclusively on suppliers known to accept cards elsewhere. While less risky, this approach limits overall cardable potential to existing precedents.
Accounting data fixes both problems at once, because it starts from what’s actually happening today rather than size ranking on assumptions based on known acceptance. When accounting data is sourced via Codat, we offer supplier acceptance matching combined with card insights. This means in addition to matching acceptance, we filter out non-convertible spend like utilities, payroll, and tax. The remaining vendors are then ranked using a combination of live accounting records and industry best practice logic, giving card sales teams a clear, actionable roadmap for supplier prioritization.
The bigger pattern
Every gap identified in this piece stems from a single issue: commercial card sales teams are too often working from a fragmented, incomplete picture of the client. They rely on manual inputs like client disclosures, surface-level summaries, and anecdotal history.
Closing the gap requires starting from a different record. One that relies on real invoices, on a vendor by vendor level, delivered by default.
A pitch built from that information looks fundamentally different. It’s aimed at a client that’s worth pursuing, pitched to the entity that actually holds the spend, sequenced toward the suppliers most likely to convert, and all backed by numbers pulled from the client’s own books.
See what your clients’ accounting data would show you
Codat connects directly to your client’s accounting and ERP systems, giving commercial card teams the vendor-level detail this piece has walked through, without waiting on a client to volunteer it.
Get in touch with our expert team to talk through what this would look like for your card program specifically.