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Comment by aikinai | Hacker News Reader

I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead.

A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.

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Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions. For a cross-country trip with a $500 flight, 3 night at a $200 hotel, 4 $25 taxi trips and 9 (average) $20 meals that works out to 1% of $1380 or $13.80. In exchange for this modest benefit you will need to keep receipts and do data entry for about 15 items. If you forget a single meal receipt or accounting disputes a single charge, you’re already in the red. It’s not even clear if this reward covers the theoretical cost of extending a loan to your employer (at consumer interest rates), which is what you’re doing.

This only adds up to a substantial benefit if you’re doing major international travel (carefully) or handling big-ticket hardware purchases on your card. Meals and travel is almost certainly a net loss.

People who travel a lot for work are often extremely attuned to the credit card rewards game, so getting only 1% back is unrealistic. You can eek out at least 5% back (and often much higher, depending on redemptions) on all travel expenses. So in this(extremely inexpensive, bare-bones) travel scenario it’s more like $65. With international or frequent travel, it’s not hard to arrive at a couple extra thousand dollars a year.

You can just use your personal card on the big ticket items (flight and hotel) and use the corporate card for the small ones, if you’re worried about forgetting something. And you can get 5% points for those expenses (with either airline/hotel brand loyalty cards, or something like Amex Platinum that works on any brand). If you’re traveling a lot and flying business class for work it can add up to thousands of dollars and pay for your vacations.

My credit card gives 5 miles per USD for flight bookings, between 3 and 5 miles per USD ofr hotel bookings (depending of direct or via an OTA) and 5 miles per USD for restaurant/food purchases. Now one can call a mile worth one cent or one and a half cent, whatever you want. Either way it's going to be closer to a 3-8% personal benefit rather than 1%. If you travel rather often it adds up.

> Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions.

This is a significant underestimate. Consider that the Citi Double Cash card gives unlimited 2% cash back on everything, and that a lot of other cards offer even higher rates (I've seen 5%) for individual categories.

And then you have silly rules like "company credit card expires after 9 months of no use" coupled which basically prevents people who travel rarely from following the rules.

Oh ye I forgot kickbacks on CC is a thing in the US.

I even remember a colleague when I worked in California boast to me about his $10000 claim recipe and the kickback.

Since it was a 5 man startup at that point I don't think it was worth the credit risk though.

Ye well ... dunno who to blame then in the CC mess.

The blame is now even more clearly on the employees. They get the hassle of expenses because they want the kickbacks.

You still have to file the expenses even if you use the company card, at least everywhere I’ve worked.

Yes, the company needs your receipts for tax compliance.

And you can still get stiffed if you loose the receipt

This particular form of embezzlement is legal so everybody can get it out of their system.

The company doesn’t care about the non-monetary perks.

They do care about making sure they reach the volume commitment on the bulk airfare and hotel rooms they have prepaid for in order to receive a large discount.

Prepayment that only works for the airlines and hotels if they’re not simultaneously discounting this large corporate customer’s rates AND paying fringe benefits to the end user.

And since they can’t tell you to not travel, this is generally why large company CFOs have policies in place that mandate these categories of spend are done via their travel agency, which was dominated by Concur prior to the SAP acquisition.

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