If you are setting up or already run a small business, you might need a way to separate your business expenses from those that are purely personal. The best way to do this is to set up a business credit card account, which will then allow you to make business transactions either by telephone, using the Internet or in person. If you authorise business credit cards for any of your employees, then they will have access to these facilities as well.



Initially, you will need to work out how the credit card will be used and to do this, you\'ll need to work out the amount of credit that your company will actually need. It is a good idea to work this out in accordance with your monthly outgoings, as your company will be paying the credit bill on a monthly basis. Once you have calculated how much credit your company can afford to borrow, you should then try and assess how many cards your company will need and which of your employees will be authorised to carry and use them. This may mean that you will need to employ a system that keeps track of your employees\' expenses. There are some credit card companies that offer a facility which reports the use of a credit card and allows the relevant data to be downloaded to accounting packages, such as Sage.





The next thing to consider is what \'credit\' means, in business terms. Put simply, it is the opportunity to borrow a fixed sum of money that is then repaid over an agreed period of time with a sum of interest for the service. If your business is already up and running, you should have a good idea of its income and expenditure and then be able to make a reasonable calculation as to how much credit the company actually needs. If your business has been trading for less than 2 years, you may want to seek financial advice to discover how much you reasonably need and, given that you are a relatively new customer, how much you can reasonably expect to apply for.



As with corporate business cards, standard business cards also come with associated loyalty reward schemes that can be very useful to small businesses; deals on hotels, car rental and road mileage can help with reducing outgoings.



A good method of finding the card that is most suitable for your business is to use one of the many available online comparison sites. These are available for business credit cards as well as those available for personal use; the comparison sites display the relevant information pertinent to each credit card, such as the introductory offers, interest rates, APR and details of each loyalty reward scheme.



You may need to issue other employees with their own business credit cards. It is essential that those employees can be trusted to use them wisely and not just as a convenient substitute for cash transactions, which can incur high rates of interest. It can be a wise move to impose an initial limit on their business spending, just to see how things go. There are business credit cards available that offer a \'reporting\' facility that can tell you how much each employee spends and the relevant data can also be downloaded onto accounting packages, like Quickbooks or Sage. This may seem a little strident but, as the person who applied for the business\' credit, you don\'t want to be liable for other people\'s thoughtless overspending.