Post by Affiliate: Mercantile
How a Business Credit Card Can Streamline Your Business
Small business credit cards can be a great way to get discounts on the products you use, or to get cash back and rewards that benefit you and your opticianry business. They’re also a great way to keep your business spending separate from your personal spending&mdash&and the OAA Business card even provides exclusive deals on numerous benefits for you and your employees.
Beyond the savings and rewards, a card like the OAA Business Card also brings some less obvious benefits that are very valuable in terms of efficiency, convenience, and time savings in your day-to-day business. Here are some of the advantages that you might not have considered:
1. Seamless accounting
When was the last time you assessed the prices you’re paying for contact lenses, or frames, for example, against your sales volume? Have you found that you’re dispensing one particular contact lens more than before? Or maybe you’re selling (and ordering) a lot more of one particular line of frames—or several lines that are all sold by the same vendor.
If your volume has increased, or shifted in a way that you’re ordering more of certain items, it’s likely you can qualify for a better pricing tier.
It also makes sense to look at ancillary costs. Shipping charges are one common culprit. For example, if you’re ordering contact lenses and solutions directly from their respective manufacturers, you might be paying many separate shipping charges each week or month.
Maybe there’s a distributor who carries all of those lenses and supplies, so you can order everything together—which minimizes not only shipping costs but also time spent ordering, if you’re only logging into or calling one source instead of several.
2. Complete visibility into spending activity
Another advantage of business credit cards is at-a-glance visibility into all of your business’ spending, credits, etc. This is a time saver, since you only have to log into one account, but it’s also very valuable because an easy-to-use dashboard—like the one offered with the OAA card—makes it easy to take in details quickly, and to spot anomalies.
Reconciliation of charges and credits is all there, in one place, and you can also see exactly how much you’re spending on each category and from each vendor—which is valuable for benchmarking, as well as identifying areas where you might be able to qualify for a greater vendor discount based on volume and spending trends.
3. Simplified expense tracking/reimbursement
Expense tracking and reimbursement is drastically simplified when you have a small business card that allows you to add cards for relevant team members, everyone on your staff who submits reimbursement for business travel, conference expenses, continuing education events, outside training, etc. can have their own card on your OAA card account. It’s free to add as many as you want, and employees can be reimbursed based on the spending shown right in the account, rather than having to save receipts and submit expense reports.
This is actually a big time saver, eliminating both the employee’s time that it takes to compile an expense report, and the time whomever administers reimbursements would spend sifting through expense reports and receipts to process those reimbursement payments.
4. Customizable employee cards
Remember those employee cards we mentioned above? In addition to the benefit of being able to add as many as you need at no charge (with the OAA card), you can also set spending limits for each card. Many of your team members may have relatively small sums that they need to charge each month, so you can set a low limit and minimize the risk of exceeding budgets, or unauthorized charges.
5. More efficient tax filing
As anyone who’s filed taxes knows, it can be very time consuming to track down all the receipts and invoices for the year. No matter how diligent we try to be, it’s easy to spend hours trying to locate—or get a replacement for—some proofs of expenditures. This is even more challenging for business owners.
When everyone in your business uses one card account—broken out by individual cards for even more granular spend tracking—all of the relevant charges are there in one place. No tracking down and then scanning or photographing paper receipts, it’s all right there in your online portal.
One card to rule them all
As you can see, a small business credit card can really save you a lot of time and hassle. More specifically, the OAA Business Card can provide you with all of these advantages, as well as exclusive discounts and perks tailored specifically to opticians. If you don’t have an OAA card, you can learn more here. Sign up in minutes to start taking advantage of the efficiency and savings it offers.
* 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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