Prepaid Travel Card for Charity

dugaldmcc

I am Treasurer for a small charity, registered with the Charity Commission, which provides training and deployment of qualified search dogs to assist in the search for missing persons in inhospitable terrain, open country, collapsed structures, urban environments and watercourses.   We have a business bank account, but we are not a registered company.

We have recently joined international search and rescue networks and must be prepared to deploy our dogs and handlers quickly anywhere in the world.  Thus we are looking for an international prepaid travel money card which can hold in preparation for our team to use if called to an emergency overseas.  Can anyone advise which card would be suitable / available to us?

Savvy_Sue

I'm not an expert in this area, but just wonder if a prepaid card is really the answer? For the following reasons:

• I presume you're going to need quite sizeable sums on it ...
• once the money is on it, you have no control over how the money is spent, and although of course you'll ask for receipts to back up any spending, they may not always be forthcoming, thus limiting your financial control
• I do not know if they are available for 'anyone' to use, or whether they'd need to be issued to each person who might need one
• I believe there is a monthly charge for each card (at least for the one I'm aware of)
• There may also be a charge for each topup
• you're going to need a system for topping up, possibly at short notice / inconvenient times

A credit card would cover you for the first issue, but you'd have the same issue of no control over spending. Such cards would definitely be issued to individuals. Still a monthly charge, but the last two issues 'go away'. 

Having said all that, where I used to work, we banked with Unity Trust who offer a credit card which is actually issued by one of the high street banks. There was an overall monthly credit limit for the organisation and for each individual: so imagine 10 people had cards, most of them with a credit limit of £500, but the organisation limit was only £3000 - in our case that never mattered because most people spent very little, and it was VERY easy to increase a limit temporarily. We could put various restrictions on the cards, eg no cash withdrawals (which might not suit you). When the bills arrived, the total would be paid by Direct Debit, and our longsuffering accounts person would endeavour to get each of us to account for our spending and submit receipts. There was a small monthly charge per card. 

I believe Unity Trust also offered a prepayment card, but we found the credit cards worked well for us and I can't quickly find a link for that now. 

I'd start by asking your regular bank what they might offer to business customers. And then consider these three options if they have nothing suitable:

https://www.unity.co.uk/ - Unity Trust, this is their credit card: https://www.unity.co.uk/business-banking/unity-corporate-multipay-card/

https://www.cafonline.org/caf-bank/current-account - they seem to have a card here: https://www.cafonline.org/caf-bank/current-account/caf-bank-business-card

https://www.triodos.co.uk/ - actually I've added them for historical completeness but they're not offering new current accounts any more