In my opinion, you should only set up credit cards as bank accounts when they are foreign currency cards. There is no reason why you could not set them up as credit cards in the system and reconcile them as credit cards. That way you are mimicking reality.

That is a lot of cards so it is important to make sure the naming of the credit cards is something than can be managed.

Setting up credit cards is done in single-user mode under Setup, Settings, Company, Credit Cards, Used.

My recommendation would be to set up one liability account for each card that receives a statement. If multiple cards are on one statement, then I would set up one liability account. You can set up multiple payment credit cards that use the same liability account for tracing through your payables entries if you wish. This way each statement can be reconciled.

During data entry, just change Pay Later to paid by the credit card used. This will then credit the liability account for the amount owing.

Payments are done in the Payments module by changing the first Drop down below the File menu to Pay Credit Card. Then select the card and record the payment. If multiple cards are on the same statement, it's not necessary to make multiple payments per month. The program doesn't track this and neither does MC as far as I know. Any payment to a statement covers all users based on oldest entry from what I know.

Reconciliation is done like a bank account but the Deposits are the payments you make against the balance owing and Withdrawals are the purchases you make with your vendors.

Just make sure you take time to do the setup and maybe start with a copy of your file to test on first so you can see how it all works and how the reporting and reconciliations help you.

As an aside comment, the original method of handling it is not specifically wrong and has the advantage of seeing what is owing on the Vendor Aged report. Using credit cards as the Credit Card feature in the program means you can mimic reality in that you buy from Staples (instead of the MC vendor) and pay by xxxx credit card so you can find the invoices under the real vendor name. However, you only see what is owing on the cards on the balance sheet.

With credit cards properly set up, and with vendors set up as Payables, you can get an exact 1 card usage to 1 account charge, making reconciliation much easier. In addition to the straightforward one card charge per invoice, it's also possible to record:

- vendor prepayments where perhaps the card is charged in April but the goods aren't shipped until July.
- any number of card payments against any number of invoices using Accounts Payable.
- payments from a CAD credit card against a 'Pay Later' invoice in a foreign currency.

Usually it's a straightforward 1:1 invoice to card charge, but sometimes you get that vendor that issues an invoice in Canadian $$ but processes the credit card in USD back in Houston using a conversion rate known only to Alicia and God.

Or the hotel that charges the card 4 times (2x before, and 2x after the statement cutoff), then credits some back, but puts it all on one invoice.

As Richard said, you want only 1 credit card account in Sage for each statement!

is this one m/c account, with 30 cards ? do you get one statement or 30 ?
if you get 30 statements, you might contact the vendor to consolidate all on one statement - makes reconciliation easier, and give you spend-details for each card

Thank you for your responses! We get 30 separate statements. I will call and ask about consolidating to one statement. Everyone has different limits - between 1000 and 12000 - though do I'm not sure if that will work.

Jen,

One could argue that you should talk with the owner of the company before attempting to arrange something different with MC. Those limits may have been setup on purpose and the minute you start combining cards on one statement, I believe you combine limits as you are alluding to and the owner may have set that up with a lot of thought.

Of course...it may not work for that reason. However, we are already having issues with some employees hitting their limits mid month, so the limits already need to be revisited. Combining the limits for long term employees might be a good solution and have the added benefit of making the reconciliations easier.

Also, thank you for your detailed response earlier, that was a huge help.

Some banks may have separate cards with individual spend limits under a single account with a combined credit limit.

The company's card administrator may be able to set the individual card limits so that the sum of the individual card limits is be more than the account limit. So less of the company's borrowing capacity is tied up.

Another advantage is that an administrator at your company can more easily change individual card limits as duties or positions change.