Startup Finance for Founders – Part I, Accounting (2016)
rein.pk
rein.pk
One thing I’d suggest doing different - instead of trying to inch up credit limits rather have that conversation at same time as the investment. ie we’re looking for a provider to park 15m but we also need a credit line/cards/whatever. The sales team wanting the 15m will push to make the line happen internally. It’s the key moment where you have leverage.
Example, $0 balance, card limit $1k, pay onto the card $10k, card limit is now $11k.
$10k of that is really prepaid and $1k is truly credit, but it would have solved their problems given they had the cash on hand and mostly wanted to avoid declines on their cards due to draining the credit limit to $0.
The problem with other forms of payments is they're only usually accepted on a contract annual basis and you're now vendor locked for the remainder of the contract. You're also up fronting the capital to that vendor.
Get an AmEx with the balance you need and use that . Much better service and protections. Or apply for a new Business Credit card with your bank.
"they had the cash on hand and mostly wanted to avoid declines on their cards"
I just tried to do this with chase, capital one, and citi. The first two only let you pay up to 10% more than your balance (balance, not credit limit) and citi only 7.5% - nowhere near 10x your credit limit.
This sounds pretty specific to the USA. Here in Europe you certainly can rent a car with a debit card.
For example, some times in other situations my debit card also rejects big purchases or new countries or some reservations of funds from some new hotel when I check in. But because they are pretty modern they also have an app that notifies me of the rejection at the same time as the terminal is told that it was rejected and so I can go in to the app and say this is actually ok and then I try again and then it goes through.
Maybe what people need is really this kind of thing like what I have with my card and the app.
When you book a rental car through an online comparison site, you will almost always see in the small print that bringing a credit card with you is one of the requirements.
If you're taking out insurance by default then you may not notice that this is an issue because you're effectively paying to reduce the excess to £0 instead of blocking a deposit on a credit card for them to charge from in the event that you damage the car.
just ideally find someone who has done this sort of work for people like you before
also, consider using ramp.com as your corp card if applicable, def best tracking/rewards of all of them
Write a tiny system that does much of the accounting. Call the `ledger` program to do the actual debits/credits so you don't waste time implementing the data storage layer.
At the end of it, you should know more than you thought possible about how the debit/credit DE-bookkeeping stuff works, and why accounts and the books are the structural foundation for any business, not just startups.