Business expense reporting using small business credit cards
Be it for accounting purpose and tax calculations or be it for
planning the future financial requirements etc of your small
business, you surely need to know what expenditures you are
making on the running of your business. The business expenses
includes small things like paying for the brochure printing job,
entertainment expenses for clients, business travel expenses or
gifts etc. If you were to use your personal credit card for
paying for these or just simply cash, then you would end up with
a load of bills/expense-statements to sort out at the end of
each month. Not only would you be spending a lot of time sorting
out what is a personal expense and what a business expense is,
but could also end up doing it wrongly. After all it's only
human to make errors in things like this. On the other hand, if
you were using your small business credit card for the payment
of all the business expenses, the need for such a sorting job is
eliminated altogether. Your monthly statement for your small
business credit card will clearly show all your business
expenses and the monthly statement of your personal credit card
will show all the personal expenses. So these are
auto-segregated.
Even your accountant would be happy if you were to exercise such
a methodology. The clarity obtained from such statements is much
better as compared to something you would scribble or do on an
excel sheet. Moreover, since the credit card companies have been
doing this since long, they have developed their own
terminologies and conventions which are consistent across
various statements over a period of time. Some of the credit
cards even group the expenses under proper headers to facilitate
accounting. You could either directly use this groupings for
your accounting purposes or you could map them to something else
in your accounting system.
Sometimes one might use the credit card statements as the sole
accounting tool. This is made easier with the credit card
company offering downloads of credit card statements in a format
which can be fed directly (or with some minor modifications)
into accounting software. That means that you can get enhanced
accounting features too by the combination of the data obtained
from the monthly statement of your small business credit card
and the powers of an accounting tool which is able to accept
that data as a feed. Can't think of a better thing, can you?
Moreover, since the small business credit cards separate your
personal and business expenses, you can also keep track of your
personal expenses and plan your budget for personal expenses too
i.e. personal accounting is simplified as well. This reduces the
hassles with doing your personal tax calculation too.
Thus, what can otherwise be a nightmare is turned into a simple
activity by small business credit cards. This reason alone is
sufficient for anyone to go for a small business credit card.
About the author:
Rudy Hadisentosa: CCN.com is a free online credit cards review
and application website. We offer credit cards selection from
visa,master cards, discover, american express and many others.
We have quite some categories and hundreds of credit cards
selection to fit your need. Apply for a credit card at CCN.com.