What is the most common type of employee card fraud?

Duplicate submissions — the same expense claimed twice, usually once on the corporate card and once through a reimbursement request. Most are honest mistakes, but the mechanical pattern is identical to deliberate fraud, so both need to be caught the same way.

How often should we review corporate card statements?

Daily review catches patterns while transactions are still fresh in everyone's memory. Waiting for month-end reconciliation means reviewing 400+ line items at once, which is when pattern recognition breaks down and small anomalies get lost in the noise.

What percentage of revenue do businesses lose to expense fraud?

The ACFE estimates organizations lose about 5% of annual revenue to occupational fraud each year, with a median loss per case of $145,000. About 32% of cases stem from a lack of internal controls, and 19% happen when employees override controls that do exist.

Can a small business detect card fraud without dedicated software?

Yes, but it requires discipline and structured reviews — sorting transactions by employee and amount, checking for round numbers and threshold clustering, listing new merchants monthly, and matching card charges against reimbursement requests. Automated daily audit tools like Quinsly compress this work into a morning digest.

5 signs of employee card fraud — and how to catch them before month-end

Employee card fraud rarely looks like fraud. It looks like a rounded-up meal, a Sunday gas station charge, or a receipt someone has already submitted. Five quiet patterns — rounded amounts and threshold clustering, duplicate submissions across card and reimbursement, off-hours and out-of-territory charges, look-alike merchants, and receipt gaps — account for most of what small businesses actually lose.

The five signs

Rounded-up amounts and just-under-threshold charges
The same receipt in two places
Weekend, late-night, and out-of-territory charges
A new merchant that looks a little too much like a real one
Receipts that arrive suspiciously perfect — or don't arrive at all

The ACFE puts the median occupational-fraud loss at $145,000 per case and estimates 5% of annual revenue lost to fraud, with over half of cases traceable to missing or overridden internal controls. A nightly audit closes the loop between "something happened" and "someone noticed" before month-end.