A rising trend recently is the use of purchasing cards among government agencies and corporations. A purchasing card, or P-Card, allows individuals to make purchases at their company’s expense without the needs of a traditional processing service. It’s essentially a company charge card.
These can be useful when a government group or corporation needs to purchase a large quantity of goods and service and want to reduce transaction costs. If your business happens to be involved with the use of these cards, whether as a merchant or consumer, there are some purchasing card best practices that you should become familiar with.
Be Aware of Excessive Fees
Engaging in transactions with government agencies and corporations who utilize these purchasing cards can be extremely beneficial for your business, because it often means larger deals that lead to wider profit margins at the end of the day. As this method of payment becomes more popular, it’s important that your business can process these payments while engaging in purchasing card best practices.
Specialized forms of payment, of course, mean specialized fees to process and store these payments. With the typically high amount of funds associated with purchasing card payments, fees can prove to be costly for your business when in a merchant role.
Keep Track of Level 2 or Level 3 Data
Level 2 or Level 3 data consists of specific information associated with each business deal that is made with a purchasing card. Due to the absence of a traditional processing service, these transactions are a lot harder to record and trace than purchases made on other types of cards or payment options. That’s why Level 2 or Level 3 data can be tremendously useful when trying to trace back a transaction from merchant to cardholder.
Examples of this type of data include a purchase order number, merchant category code, or any other numerical reference point specific to a transaction between your business and a government agency or other corporation. Collecting this data makes it significantly easier to go back and track down a payment when it comes time to reconcile.
Whenever participating in a transaction featuring a purchase card, it’s imperative that your business remembers these purchasing card best practices to save both time and money. Visit Allied Wallet for more financial tips and tricks.
