Why I stopped reimbursing crypto expenses and issued corporate cards instead

For two years I ran our team’s spending on reimbursements. People paid out of pocket, screenshotted receipts, and waited for me to pay them back.

It was slow, it annoyed everyone, and for a crypto company it was twice as painful. Half the team wanted paying back in stablecoins, half in fiat, and I was the human exchange desk in the middle. So I scrapped the whole system and issued crypto corporate cards instead.

Here’s why I’d never go back.

Reimbursements punish the people doing the work.

When a contractor fronts $600 for software and waits ten days to get it back, that’s a loan they didn’t agree to give. I watched good people get quietly resentful about it.

Giving them a card funded from our own balance flipped that. They spend the company’s money, not theirs.

Cards capture the data reimbursements never did.

With receipts, I was reconstructing what happened weeks later from blurry photos. With crypto corporate cards, every transaction shows up tagged with who, what, and when, the moment it happens.

My month-end close went from days to about an hour.

I set the rules once instead of policing every purchase.

Reimbursements meant judging each expense after the fact, which is a terrible time to find out someone overspent. Now I set per-person limits and category rules up front.

The card declines what’s outside policy. I stopped being the spending police.

The crypto part finally stopped being a headache.

This is the bit that mattered most for us. We hold stablecoins, so funding the cards directly from that balance meant no converting, reimbursing, then converting again.

Money goes from our stablecoin balance to a card to a vendor, in one clean line.

If you’re still reimbursing, you’re the bottleneck.

I was. Every payment waited on me, every receipt waited on me, every reconciliation waited on me.

Handing the team cards with sane limits gave me my month-end back, and gave them the dignity of not lending the company money every week.