Personal Finance Advice

Your boss hands you a credit card.  It has your name on it as well as the name of the company you work for.  You’re briefed about the proper usage for the card and urged to only use it when making purchases for products and services needed for your job.  You place the card in your wallet and feel pretty good about the fact that your boss trusts you enough to give you a corporate credit card.

If you do what you’re supposed to do, you’ll only use the card when making purchases required by your job.  Maybe it’s your job to purchase supplies for your office, or maybe it’s your job to wine and dine prospective clients.  Either way, a corporate credit card gives you the flexibility you need to  do your job while also skipping the step of filing expense reports to await reimbursement. 

Then again, it also has the potential to get you into a lot of trouble if you misuse the card.

Imagine you’re at a restaurant with a date and the bill comes out to be much more than you anticipated.  You’re not entirely sure that you have enough available credit on your own credit card to pay the bill, but you know for sure that if you whip out your corporate credit card you’ll have no problem getting the purchase authorized.  Do you use the corporate card and then turn around and pay the bill yourself online, hoping that nobody from Human Resources catches the purchase? Or worse yet, do you use the card and just assume that your purchase can pass as a business expense?

It’s a slippery slope when you use your corporate credit card for personal expenses.  If you get away with it once you might assume that you can do it over and over again, and then when all your purchases are suddenly discovered you’ll have a great deal of explaining to do.  Make no mistake about it; you can lose your job if you use your corporate credit card for your own purchases, even if you pay the money back.  At the very least, you’ll lose a great deal of credibility and trust from your employer.  At the worst, you can find yourself fired with a potential lawsuit on your hands.

Unless your boss tells you otherwise, a corporate credit card shouldn’t be used for anything that isn’t related to work.  Before you use the card, find out exactly what you’re allowed to charge.  You don’t want to wind up getting into big trouble as a result of not knowing when you’re allowed to use your card and when you aren’t.