TL;DR

• Extend wins Tearsheet’s Best Payments for SMBs for the third consecutive year
• Sustained recognition reinforces Extend as the leading virtual card provider for SMBs
• Budgets and Bill Pay deliver real-time visibility and streamlined payments
• The AI-powered platform offers modern spend & expense controls and flexible virtual card issuance
• Designed for SMBs seeking secure, scalable payment solutions

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Picking the right virtual card provider has become a high-stakes decision for small and midsize businesses. Payments move quickly, teams are scattered across locations, and finance leaders need tools that help them stay ahead. That’s why earning recognition from a trusted industry voice matters, as it shows which platforms are truly supporting that pace.

This year, we were named “Best Virtual Card Provider” by Tearsheet for a third time in a row. An exciting achievement we take pride in, because keeping that level of performance year after year requires building products that make business spending easier, more organized, and more predictable for the people who rely on them every day.

Multi-year recognition in a space as competitive as payments sends a clear message: when companies choose Extend, they’re choosing a partner committed to consistency, steady improvement, and long-term reliability.

What makes a virtual card provider “the best”?

Plenty of platforms offer virtual card numbers, but leading providers go further; they give teams the structure and visibility needed to stay organized and avoid last-minute surprises—all with the simplicity of fitting into existing workflows.

When SMBs evaluate virtual card solutions, they tend to look for a few key capabilities:

• Flexible controls: set limits by project, vendor, amount, or timeframe
  
  
• Instant card creation: issue a card the moment a need comes up
  
  
• Real-time visibility: monitor spend as it happens, not days or weeks later
  
  
• Accounting integrations: reduce manual entry and keep records accurate
  
  
• Strong safeguards: unique card numbers and quick shutoff options that help prevent misuse

These capabilities matter across a wide range of daily situations: paying contractors, managing one-off purchases, covering team travel, or handling recurring expenses like software subscriptions and advertising platform charges. The best solutions make even hundreds of charges feel manageable, organized, and easily traceable when it’s time to review spend at the end of the month.

Why Extend stands out as the best virtual card provider

Many finance teams still manage day-to-day purchases with tools that don’t match their needs. They’re either too outdated to support fast-paced workflows or overly complex and hard to adopt. Extend bridges the gap by offering an easy way to issue cards, guide team spending, and tie every transaction back to the right job or budget.

Virtual cards are just the starting point. How those cards work in concert with other features like budgets, receipt management, and reporting and reconciliation tools is what drives the biggest impact. Together, they create a smooth path from approving spend before a card is even charged through ensuring accountability and accuracy as transactions hit the books.  Extend is a first-class expense management platform with award-winning virtual card spend management built in.

Here are a few common challenges Extend helps simplify:

• Projects or client expenses: Empower teams that manage project budgets or ad hoc expenditures with secure virtual cards, while finance maintains total oversight of spend activity and budget pacing.
  
  
• Controlling vendor charges: When vendors bill outside agreed-upon terms or require authorization forms, finance teams can limit wrongful charges and limit exposure risk
  
  
• Dispersed teams: When employees are spread across locations or job sites, finance managers can maintain centralized control with tools that offer real-time transparency and flexible control over who can spend where, when, and how much.

With Extend, you set the rules upfront, see spend as it flows in, and route approvals without juggling spreadsheets or email chains. The AI-powered platform removes friction from daily financial operations—a key reason it continues to earn industry recognition and customer trust.

What the Tearsheet Award means for SMB buyers

Industry awards can feel abstract, but for business owners and finance leaders, they serve a real purpose: to help separate platforms that talk about innovation from those that consistently deliver it. Tearsheet’s recognition carries weight because it reflects feedback from operators, analysts, and practitioners who understand what it takes to build dependable financial tools.

Winning three years in a row shows we don’t sit still; Extend continues to evolve to meet the needs of growing businesses. For SMBs, that kind of third-party validation offers reassurance that you are choosing a tool that will continue to evolve, stay compliant, and support more complex needs as the business scales.

You can see the impact in everyday moments: vendor payments getting processed on time, fewer back-and-forth questions about purchases, better tracking for project-based spend, and a monthly close that doesn’t require investigating charges or digging through emails or spreadsheets. These improvements help teams regain time and reduce operational stress.

Sure, awards don’t tell the whole story, but they’re a meaningful signal. And in this case, they reflect a platform that’s been tested, trusted, and recognized for making SMB financial operations easier to manage.

Extend’s advantage

One of the biggest reasons SMBs choose Extend is simple: everything runs on the credit card you already have—no need to switch banks, open new accounts, or integrate complicated software. You keep working with the institution you trust, and Extend layers modern spend and expense management tools on top of it. Virtual cards, budgets, bill pay, reimbursements, and more all connect back to the same card program you’re already using.

And while virtual cards sit at the center, they’re part of a broader system that helps finance teams close the loop on every transaction. AI-powered categorization, automated receipt collection, approval workflows, and seamless accounting syncs make it easy to move from card issuance to expense review to reconciliation — all in one platform.

Here’s how it comes together:

• Issue a virtual card instantly from your existing credit card line
  
  
• Add the guardrails you need: spend limits, expirations, vendor rules, or project tags
  
  
• Route every purchase through a budget so spending stays organized from the start
• Add receipts easily to each transaction through the mobile app
  
  
• Automate reconciliation with AI-powered categorization and seamless accounting syncs

By connecting payments and expense management in one place, Extend gives SMBs a simple, scalable way to control spend and keep their financial operations running smoothly — without switching banks or opening new lines of credit. 

Choose a platform that grows with you

Your business moves quickly. New projects start, teams shift, vendors change, and your payment tools need to keep up. That’s why choosing a platform that is reliable and can adapt to your business is crucial. 

That’s the commitment behind Extend. And it’s why so many SMBs choose to build their spend & expense management workflows with us. Our three-year streak in Tearsheet’s awards reflects a proven product that keeps advancing and a team focused on solving the real challenges companies face as they grow.

We'd love to show you what Extend can do for you, too.