Positive balance on Credit Card ?

ScoobyL73

Hi,

After a bit of advice on this one...

The company I work for are changing the way they service expenses (fuel, hotel stays, etc); At the moment I have a company credit card & I submit the receipts every month.....No problem.

Going forward, the company are going to provide us with a float which we will deduct our expenses from & then every month, we have to submit our receipts to get the float topped up again.

My concern is that some months, I may go over my float, so I was considering getting a personal credit card & putting the float onto it, giving me a bit of flexibility if I run out of float & effectively having a positive balance but I'm not sure if this is possible / permitted by the credit card provider ??

Thanks for reading,

Dave.

grumbler

ScoobyL73 said:

...I was considering getting a personal credit card & putting the float onto it, giving me a bit of flexibility if I run out of float & effectively having a positive balance ...

I understand neither how this 'float' works, nor your plan. Is it just me?

Ebe_Scrooge

Deliberately putting a card into credit is against the T&Cs of pretty much all cards.  If it's a small amount, you can usually get away with it.  But theoretically they could close the card - although in practice it's more likely that they will just refuse or return the payment.

Can't you just use a personal credit card for expenses, then pay it off when the bill arrives using the expenses from your employer?

ScoobyL73

Ebe_Scrooge said:

Deliberately putting a card into credit is against the T&Cs of pretty much all cards.  If it's a small amount, you can usually get away with it.  But theoretically they could close the card - although in practice it's more likely that they will just refuse or return the payment.

Can't you just use a personal credit card for expenses, then pay it off when the bill arrives using the expenses from your employer?

Thanks, I thought that might be the case.  As we are going to be given the initial float up-front, I might have to put that into a instant access savings account (maybe) or open another current account, otherwise if I leave it in my day to day current account I am worried it will just get swallowed up eventually.

Thanks,

Dave.

Ebe_Scrooge

ScoobyL73 said:

Ebe_Scrooge said:

Deliberately putting a card into credit is against the T&Cs of pretty much all cards.  If it's a small amount, you can usually get away with it.  But theoretically they could close the card - although in practice it's more likely that they will just refuse or return the payment.

Can't you just use a personal credit card for expenses, then pay it off when the bill arrives using the expenses from your employer?

Thanks, I thought that might be the case.  As we are going to be given the initial float up-front, I might have to put that into a instant access savings account (maybe) or open another current account, otherwise if I leave it in my day to day current account I am worried it will just get swallowed up eventually.

Thanks,

Dave.

Sounds like a good plan.  It's no hassle to open a basic current account with any bank, that would be by far the simplest approach.  An instant-access savings account is also a possibility - although, will you make enough interest on it to make it worth the bother?

I would think the main consideration (for ease of use) would be to just make sure you can do standard online banking with whatever account you choose.  That way you can pay off the credit card from your expenses account online, quickly and easily, at any time, and you won't even have to bother about shifting money from your expense account to your existing current account every time you want to make a payment to the card.

DullGreyGuy

Are they giving you personally a petty cash sum or is being held by the company in your name/departments name? Sounds like the former

Presumably they are taking back the corporate credit card?

What has been the discussion about topping up the float? Is it just done monthly? Can you do it ad hoc once the float gets below £X

To be honest it sounds a terrible idea and a nightmare to deal with when someone resigns or is fired for the company to know what float is left and recover it. 

ScoobyL73

DullGreyGuy said:

Are they giving you personally a petty cash sum or is being held by the company in your name/departments name? Sounds like the former

Presumably they are taking back the corporate credit card?

What has been the discussion about topping up the float? Is it just done monthly? Can you do it ad hoc once the float gets below £X

To be honest it sounds a terrible idea and a nightmare to deal with when someone resigns or is fired for the company to know what float is left and recover it. 

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I believe the money is being given to us personally as petty cash & they are taking back the corporate CC.

Generally, I believe that the company only want to process the claim once a month, but we have also being told that in the case of any large expenses, they will process them immediately, I think I am just going to have to monitor it very closely.

I completely agree that it is going to be a nightmare to manage!

DullGreyGuy

It all depends on how good the people are at doing the payments. 

A former employer was wanting to give me a card but something had gone wrong in the process and who could authorise it had been forgotten and the card issuer wouldnt tell them for DPA reasons. At one point my expenses were easily £10k a month but you knew that the money would be in the bank on the friday you after you submitted your expenses so comfortably in the 28 days of interest free after the statement is created.

Its one of the reasons I got so my airmiles as was getting points on all the purchases plus then the ones on the flights I took.