Post by Affiliate: Mercantile
A Key To Controlling Your Business Spending:
Staff Credit Cards
An optical shop is a complex organization—you have a wide range of expenses and charges every day, week and month. You’re probably ordering from at least one contact lens vendor, multiple frame vendors, optical labs, as well as utilities, office supplies, office snacks, software subscriptions… it’s a lot to keep track of, and it’s easy to lose track of some of them. It’s not an ideal environment for keeping control of (or visibility into) your business spending.
In addition to the numerous daily charges to so many different vendors and providers, there’s another complex variable: the staff members making these charges. While your staff is probably perfectly trustworthy, there’s a lot of room for honest mistakes here, and even in the best of circumstances you have little ability to see a clean, real-time snapshot of all of the charges and money going out at any given time. This all represents a tremendous risk to your business bottom line.
Office manager
Given that office managers typically have responsibility for everything from ordering supplies, special occasion lunches, to booking business travel and paying bills, this one is a clear yes: if you have an office manager, they should certainly have a credit card.
An easy way to solve for business spending chaos
What’s the solution? There’s actually a simple way to eliminate the vast majority of all of the above risks and concerns: designated credit cards for each member of your business.
Many small business credit cards offer additional cards for the same account. The OAA Business Card allows you to add as many cards as you need—at no additional charge. This and other advantages are a vital tool to control spending in your business, and some other features of the OAA card also bring advantages like visibility and time savings.
Custom spending limits
In addition to offering you the ability to add business cards for each employee who needs one, the OAA card allows you to set custom spending limits for each one. So you can look at each staff member’s typical spending needs, and set the limit accordingly.
By setting spending limits and using just one credit card account—with dedicated cards for each staff member—for your business, you can eliminate overspending and errors, and have virtually complete control over your business spending.
Complete, at-a-glance visibility into all activity
Having just one account to log in to, and being able to see all the latest activity in seconds is a huge advantage for any business. The OAA card offers just that: the easy-to-use portal lets you see all charges and credits in real time, and you can also see each staff member’s spending activity.
The ability to see all of the charging activity for your business in one place is a great way to monitor spending, but it’s also really helpful as a way to see all of your spending activity by category and vendor. So it’s also a useful advantage for keeping track of general business trends and benchmarks.
Seamless QuickBooks® integration
Beyond basic spending activity and trends is more complex accounting and analysis—and with the OAA card it’s enabled by an integration with QuickBooks.
If you have an OAA card account it can be connected to QuickBooks; and once that’s set up, you can do up-to-the-minute exports of all spending activity. This means that you can view your spending data and analyze it against historical trends, then filter it to see whatever insights you need.
Get started today
If you don’t already have designated staff member cards set up, it’s definitely something you should consider doing, if you have a business credit card that allows it. And if you want the full complement of all of the above benefits (and more), the OAA Business Card can provide that—and you can sign up and get started in a matter of minutes, right here*.
* Conditions apply. Subject to approval. Mercantile Financial Technologies, Inc. is a financial technology company, not a bank. The OAA Credit Cards are issued by Hatch Bank pursuant to a license from Mastercard. Mastercard is a registered trademark, and the circles design is a trademark of Mastercard International Incorporated. Review the cardholder agreement here.
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