Millie here, check out our new blog on credit card processing.
Many companies today are using credit cards to purchase everything from gas to materials. Why? Credit card purchasing provides several advantages. They are:
As companies broaden the areas that they participate in work, providing a supervisor with a credit card can dramatically reduce the cost and effort of purchasing material, setting up logistics, renting equipment, and providing lodging and meals, just to name a few.
Many credit card companies will allow you to participate in the fees generated through charges
Immediate costing: If the right workflow is in place (see below)
Deferred payment.
However, managing the transaction volume can be very tedious and cumbersome. I will show you how to use technology and management to reduce the time of processing credit cards by over 50% and leverage technology to get immediate costing information posted to jobs.
Let's begin with some basic concepts:
There are several solutions that provide immediate capture of credit card information (Image) with validated costing and coding that can automatically route and approve, then post and update the ERP system on a daily basis. All the card holder has to do is snap a picture, enter the coding, and submit, and the rest is automated.
Reconciliation become a daily or weekly event. Accounting downloads the transactions from the credit card vendors and matches the receipts with the transaction (much like bank reconciliation). Using this technique provides three very basic advantages:
It levels out cash flow by making weekly payments
It insures all cost is posted for the period between reconciliations
Cost reporting and dashboards include these purchases and are very accurate
From a management perspective the most important part of the process is to get your card holders to submit their transaction daily. If you do weekly reconciliations, the violators will filter to the top.
By having the cardholders start the transaction and if your system has routing, you can implement a coding step by the office if your cardholders are not able to handle that part of the process. You might even deploy a hybrid process where some will code and others will not.
This process eliminates all of the time intensive processes like:
Making copies of the statement and sending them around for coding
Double and triple entry of data
Scanning and managing all those receipts
Automation of the data entry to ERP
Creating support for T & M Billing
To conclude, it has been my experience that the implementation of a credit card solution, especially if more than 10 cards are involved (including gas and pcards) can eliminate over 50% of the time that it takes to process and reconcile credit card transactions, improve the timing of getting cost and expenses to the accounting system, eliminates double entry, improve the flow of information, and get your cost recorded faster. Also, if those transaction are needed for billing, a good system will store the receipts and allow accounting to retrieve and bundle the receipt support for billing.
Contact me for more information or if you are looking for a solution:
Steve Jordan
Stevej@jorco.biz
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