How to handle wrong payments and incorrect card use in Cardboard

Cardboard's payment platform is built around one core premise: "one virtual card per service". For each subscription you add in Cardboard you get a dedicated card for making payments to just that specific subscription. This has multiple benefits:

• A card can be suspended or closed without affecting any other subscription.
• The system is able to connect each card payment to the correct subscription, by virtue of the card being earmarked to that subscription; enabling such features as detailed cost breakdown and dedicated spending notifications and limits.
• Cardboard can correctly determine how to collect and match receipts to each payment.
• Your accounting can be automated with a high degree of accuracy, as each card can be matched with a specific supplier in your accounting system.

The performance of these features degrades if cards are incorrectly used. Let's take an example, say a card dedicated to Google Cloud Platform is used to make payments for Microsoft Azure. As a consequence, costs end up being misattributed, insights become misleading, and automated accounting provided by Cardboard (such as VAT handling) will end up being wrong. It also becomes more difficult to identify actual fraudulent use of cards, either by the cardholder or by malicious third parties.

How to detect incorrect card use

You will be notified in different ways when a card has been incorrectly used:

• An email is sent to the user that has been specified as the owner of the subscription.
• A warning is shown on each payment that is potentially a result of wrong card use. Hover over the orange warning triangle to see more information.

• A warning banner is rendered when you navigate to the payment itself.

Cardboard automatically detects if a card has been incorrectly used by comparing the recipient of the payment, known as the merchant, against the service the card is assigned to. This is done by a custom-built algorithm that uses proprietary online payment data that has been collected and curated over multiple years.

Note that the classification system is not perfect and might at times identify valid payments as potential wrong card use. For example, a service might have rebranded without the system having detected it, and the first payment after the rebrand might be flagged until the system learns about the rebrand. Feel free to contact support if you think you have identified a payment being flagged incorrectly.

How to handle a payment caused by incorrect card use

Cardboard allows you to handle payments that are the result of incorrect card use. Here is what you should do:

1. Identify which service the payment actually paid for; either by asking the user that used the wrong card or by inspecting the merchant information shown on the payment page.
2. Create a new correct subscription in Cardboard for the specific service, if it hasn't already been created.
3. Navigate to the payment and reassign it by pressing "Change subscription". Select the new correct subscription and click "Save".
4. Make sure to replace the card details that were used to make the wrong payment with the card of the new correct subscription in Cardboard. This is often done in the billing settings of the relevant service. This will prevent further payments from being made with the wrong card.

Feel free to contact support if you need assistance.

How to prevent incorrect card use

There are several things you can do in order to prevent Cardboard cards from being incorrectly used in the first place.

• Enable Cardboard's "Strict Cards" functionality. This will block card payments if they are identified as wrong use of the card. Read more about in the help article about Strict cards.
• Don't use a single card for multiple services. Instead, create a separate subscription in Cardboard for each service. For instance, add separate subscriptions for ChatGPT and Claude rather than creating a single "AI Spend" card. This should make it easier to do the accounting correctly.
• Take care to never save card details outside of Cardboard, such as in a password manager (1Password), browser (Google Chrome), or payment checkout flow (Stripe). Such saved details are easily used for payments to the wrong service in the future. It is best to always retrieve the card details directly from Cardboard where the card details are safely stored.