Paying for the daily and long-term needs of a growing business can be challenging. Venture capital investments and small business loans can cover many of those costs if you can get them. One of the easiest options for business funding is business credit cards. While they do not generally have high enough limits to finance all purchases, many daily expenses can be effectively managed with business credit cards. Beyond just purchasing power, these cards offer three great bonuses.
Rewards
Most of the major credit cards – VISA, Mastercard, American Express and Discover – offer reward plans with their business credit accounts. Just from making normal business purchases, you can earn things like 1.5 percent cash back on all purchases or 5 percent cash back on purchases at places like office stores or hotels. Other rewards might include things like reward points for car rentals, gas purchases or airline travel. As long as you are staying current on your card and only buying things you would anyway for your business, these rewards can be significant financial advantages to your company.
Accounting Help
Many credit cards for businesses come with useful accounting tools. Most will integrate with Quickbooks and can provide purchase tracking by category. They often let you create year-end summaries and make it very easy to download all sorts of financial reports. All of these tools can help you save time and money when filing your business taxes as well as simply help you keep track of your business expenditures.
Employee Credit Cards
Another benefit of most business credit cards is the ability to add employees to the account and issue them business credit cards for company purchases. Some cards will allow you to limit their purchases to a certain dollar amount or limit them to certain retailers or vendors. Granting credit card access to employees can free up time by having them do some of the necessary buying while you tackle more important projects. At the same time, you can have peace of mind about their spending since you will be able to monitor all purchases on the company account.
When applying for business credit cards, it is important to check all the terms, conditions and fees, but you should also compare the bonus features and rewards programs to make sure you get the most out of your credit account.