Business Expense Reporting Using Small Business Credit Cards
We know that there are multiple benefits associated with a small business credit card. However, business expense reporting is probably one of the most important benefits.
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.
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