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Personal Credit Card Alternatives for Nonprofits

By: Toffer Grant

 

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If you run the finances for a nonprofit organization, chances are you have questions about expense management. While there isn’t an expense management bible specifically for nonprofits, there is a lot of good advice on the internet—the trick is sorting through the muck to find the gems. One common question for smaller groups is whether they should use their personal credit card for expenses and then submit an employee reimbursement claim or use some other mechanism for funding the daily purchases required to run the nonprofit. So what is the best answer? Below is a breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of using personal credit or a personal credit card alternative.

 
Advantages of using a personal credit card to fund nonprofit expenses
 
Points. Everyone loves free stuff right? With personal credit cards, you can rack up the points really quick by expensing business purchases. With those points, you can use them later for perks such as business supplies, cash back, or even travel. Similar to points, frequent flyer miles are often a very good reason to use your personal credit card. With the miles you earn from spending on your nonprofit expenses, you can use the miles to fly to a conference or use them for personal travel (better check to make sure that’s acceptable per your organization’s guidelines first however). 
 
Advantages of using a personal credit card alternative
 
If your nonprofit organization has strict policy guidelines regulating perks, gifts, etc, chances are frequent flyer miles or points accumulated through personal credit cards are probably frowned upon. There are however, fairly substantial benefits for using a personal credit card alternative to fund your daily nonprofit expenses. First and foremost, using your personal credit to fund anything other than personal expenses is a risk. Maybe Joe from accounting comes down with the flu and the expense checks are cut a week late… after you just expensed a $5,000 conference trip in Austin. Other benefits for using a personal credit card alternative is that you can really save a lot of time. With solutions built-in for many different industries, using solutions like PEX Card is one of the best ways to manage nonprofit expenses, delegate funds to employees, and make the entire reimbursement cycle smoother. Lastly, but certainly not least-ly (err…) by using a prepaid debit card as an alternative, you can save on interest fees which come with corporate or company credit cards.
 
Published: June 10, 2014
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Toffer Grant

Realizing that banks and card issuers were not serving the development of prepaid debit card services for small and mid-sized companies, Toffer Grant founded PEX Card to help SMBs maximize the efficiency of their financial operations. His career in the prepaid card industry began in 2000 at Clarity Payment Solutions, a leading venture-backed platform company servicing the budding prepaid industry. Toffer focused on customized check to card payment conversions for large brand corporate clients and grew a high value reseller network for the company. Over six years, he initiated 65 prepaid card programs in consumer, corporate and emerging verticals of the prepaid card industry.  Toffer saw the company grow from a tech startup to life in a large public company after acquisition by TSYS in 2004. Follow Toffer on LinkedIn and PexCard on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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