You did the hard thing. You built your Direct Primary Care (DPC) practice from nothing, signed up members one by one, and figured out how to run it your way. Then you started hiring. A front desk person, a medical assistant, and maybe someone to help bring in new patients.
Each hire took something off your plate, and the practice started to feel less like a job you do and more like a business you run. But running a business means buying for it, and once a few people are doing that, it quietly turns into a chore.
There’s one card everyone shares, so it’s never quite clear who bought what. The front desk keeps asking you to reorder gloves and printer paper, and half the time it goes on your personal card because that's what's fastest. This is the part nobody warned you about.
It's not that your team spends too much, and it's not a sign you hired the wrong people. It's that the way you buy and keep track of spending never grew up alongside the practice.
When you have multiple people buying for a practice, it usually looks something like this:
More people can spend, but nobody has a clear view of it all — so by default, it all lands back on you to piece together.
Here’s how that shows up day to day:
1. The shared card is a mystery at month-end. One card, several people, and a statement full of charges you have to reverse-engineer. You spend part of every month playing detective on your own practice's spending.
2. Your own card is on the line. You end up fronting purchases on your personal card, or a business card that runs on your personal credit. Either way, the practice's spending is riding on you personally.
3. Receipts are a scavenger hunt, or a risk you didn't need to take. Closing the books means chasing your team for receipts to match every charge. When there isn't time, you skip it, and that shortcut costs more than it seems. Without receipts, you can't back up your deductions if the IRS ever asks, and a purchase that shouldn't have happened can slip through the cracks.
The best-run practices all operate the same way: each person has spending power inside limits you set, with visibility built in by default. It looks like this:
You set the rules once. Issue a card for each person or vendor and put a spending limit and a category on each. Give the front desk a $300-a-week card that only works for supplies. Lock a card to your lab so it works nowhere else. Freeze any card the moment a staff member leaves or when the card is no longer needed, and your own card is never exposed.
Your team spends within your guidelines, and you don't have to think about it. Every purchase lands in one place as it happens, receipt attached, so there's no month-end scavenger hunt. The books close in minutes instead of taking days.
You end up with more oversight than you had when you were buying everything yourself, and it's all far less work.
When spending gets messy, the typical next move is to look for a corporate card, a spend-management app, and another dashboard to log into. But that means one more system to set up, and one more place your practice's data lives, at risk for exposure.
If you're using the Hint platform, spend management is already included in your subscription. There's nothing new to buy, no new vendor to onboard, and no bank to switch to. Hint Spend Management connects to the account you already use, and you can turn it on in Hint Marketplace.
Because it's built into the Hint platform, everything is wired to your practice’s own data, bank, and books. Purchases and their receipts flow straight into Hint Bookkeeping or QuickBooks.
It also changes how you qualify for the card. Most business cards set your limit based on your personal credit and put your name on the line.
Hint Spend Management sets your limit based on your practice's own bank data instead, so it stays separate from your personal credit, there's no personal guarantee, and the limit reflects how the practice is actually doing. Most owners get a decision the same day, often with a much higher credit limit than other cards allow.
Once every card runs through Hint, the visibility problem you started with disappears. Spend Insights gives you one live view of the practice's spending: what each person and category is spending, how this month compares to the last few, and where it's quietly creeping up.
That's the piece that was missing all along. Now you can spot the lab charges inching up month over month, catch a subscription you forgot you were paying, and confirm at a glance that the front desk stayed inside its limit, without asking anyone or waiting for the statement.
And because it's built from real purchases on real cards, it's always current. You're not rebuilding a spreadsheet after the fact, you're looking at what's happening right now.
You didn't build your DPC practice to do everything yourself. You built it for autonomy and the freedom to run things your way. Giving your team real spending power, inside limits you set, and with everything visible in one place, you that freedom back.
To get started, enable Hint Spend Management in Hint Marketplace. And if you'd like help getting set up, you can reach a real person on the Hint Spend Management team by booking a short onboarding call or emailing spendsupport@hint.com.