Business credit cards make expense reporting so much easier

The aim of a business is to expand. There must be very few business owners who launch a company in order for it to remain as it was when it was first launched; expanding business means more clients, which then means a greater turnover and an increase in profits. Expansion also means more staff and more staff generally incurs more paperwork, especially when it comes to accounting and expense reporting. A business credit card not only offers you a lifeline for times in the business's career when cash flow might be problematic; it also offers you a convenient and simple method of managing the extra bits of paper that accompany a business's development.

At the point of expansion, employees are generally issued with a business credit card of their own. Many of these come with the facility to limit employee spending, which can be incredibly useful during a company's formative years; the business may not be awash with cash - perhaps there are delays in payments from large accounts - but business needs to run as normal and that means things need to be paid for. However, ensuring that each employee has a fixed amount with which to pay for necessary transactions can save money in the long term.

The popularity of business credit cards is partly due to the consolidation of bills; while you may have a number of employees conducting business on the company's behalf and using their credit cards in the process, your company receives one large bill that is broken down in different ways - generally by the type of transaction, the employee's name and the date and time that the card was used. This offers a practical way to monitor expenditure and to submit accounts, rather than receiving numerous hotel bills, petrol, car rental and restaurant bills and handing them over to an accountant.

In turn, this allows accurate and dependable expense reports to be submitted, even in the event that an employee has forgotten to submit an appropriate receipt; the records are already existent. In addition, the facility allows the business owner to analyse business expenses and predict what they might be in the future, making annual budgeting a lot simpler and, hopefully, a lot more accurate.

The system can also save employees a lot of paperwork and valuable hours that could be used more constructively. Using a business card for expense reporting means they no longer have to file paper reports. Instead, they can just log on to an online record of their spending and tick which expenses the company is liable for. The accountant can then check and approve these figures before paying them. A business credit card doesn't have to remove perks from the employee either. For many employees, using their personal card for expense purposes meant they were able to qualify for certain benefits, in accordance with the amount of road-miles they 'clocked-up'. It was the case that, when using a business credit card, these perks were handed directly to the company; now most business credit cards allow the employee to benefit from their time travelling. Some of these cards even come with travel insurance, benefiting the company and the employee.

A business credit card makes reporting expenses far easier than collating receipts and submitting paper forms; the information is accurate and undeniable. There are cards available that also offer the company protection through insuring against fraud and employee misuse. With another boom in the amount of small businesses taking place, the card providers are constantly engineering better deals and services for these dynamic pieces of plastic; these can only serve to benefit both the company and the employee.