One of the management facilities available with a procurement card is the ability to permit (or block) its use with general categories of expenditure. These are known as spending, or merchant, categories.
What categories are blocked will depend on the institution’s approach to using the card i.e. whether it is to be used with only contracted suppliers or it may be used with any supplier capable of taking a credit card payment.
It is up to each individual institution to determine which categories of goods and services to block and will, to a certain extent, be dependent on the type of suppliers with whom the users will be permitted to use the card for their low value requirements.
Our advice is to always block cash but leave all or as many of the other categories open as possible. This is because suppliers can be miscategorised or not in a category you would expect.