Your organization's money sits in its ImpactGraph account, a real bank account with its own account and routing number. You decide how money moves out of it, and how much access the people you work with get.

As the account holder, your organization has full use of the account, the same as any business bank account: you can send payments, move funds, and share the account details.

The people you delegate spending to don't get that level of access. A sponsored project, for example, never sees the account and routing numbers. They spend through two controlled paths instead: Bill Pay, where every payment is approved first, and spend cards, which carry the limits you set. That is what lets you hand out

spending without handing over the account.

A bill never pays out on its own. When someone creates a bill in Bill Pay, it goes to an approver who reviews it and either approves or rejects it. Payment is only sent after the bill is approved.

If you operate under a fiscal sponsor, your sponsor is the approver. No payment leaves the account without the sponsor's sign-off, so routing an expense through Bill Pay puts it in front of an approver every time.

Every spend card can have a spending limit: an amount, and how often that amount resets (per purchase, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or all time). You set the limit when you issue the card, and you can change it later.

You can also choose whether a card is virtual or physical, block specific merchant categories, and restrict a card to US merchants only. A common approach is to start a cardholder on a low limit, then raise it as you build a track record with them. Many organizations issue a virtual card with a tight limit for one-off purchases and a separate physical card with a lower recurring limit for everyday spend.

For the full walkthrough, see Set spending limits on a spend card.

You control each card's status from its detail view:

Spend cards are debit-backed. A purchase goes through only if your account holds the funds to cover it. If it doesn't, the card is declined at the point of sale. There is no line of credit and no overdraft, so a card can't push your balance below zero.

For a fiscal sponsor, this is the control that matters most. A sponsored organization can only spend the funds it actually holds in its account, so the sponsor never covers a project's spending out of its own pocket. Funds reach an organization's account through the donations and payments it receives, not through credit.

The cleanest setup uses both. Route larger or one-off payments through Bill Pay so each one is approved before it pays. Hand out spend cards with limits for the everyday purchases you're comfortable delegating. Either way, spending stays inside the funds the account already holds.

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