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Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

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Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#91

Post by ams6110 »

cmdrfred wrote: post #89
chrsstrm wrote: post #80

Just keep in mind when applying that you might have personal joint liability for your business card's balance. We have a Chase Ink Business Cash card that I applied for as a representative of our company and had to provide my SSN on the application. The card was approved no problem but looking at Chase's offerings enticed me to apply for the Sapphire card for myself. I got denied a Sapphire card despite a damn near p…

So if the company goes belly up its possible that you'll end up holding the bag? That is horrifying coming from someone who has worked for mismanaged companies.

He's speaking about the person opening the credit card account in the business's name (generally the founder/owner/CEO etc.)

As an employee using the company card you would not have personal liability.

Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#92

Post by fredophile »

I'm going to assume you're trying to maximize for cash back and ignore other potential perqs like price protection, extended warranties, etc.

I'd say your two best bets would be either the Chase Ink Preferred or Amex Business Rewards Gold. Both offer 3 points per dollar spent in some categories. The Amex card explicitly lists cloud computing, the Chase card includes internet and online advertising. I'd recommend doing a bit of research to make sure your spending fits into the bonus categories.

If you're redeeming the points for statement credit you'll get 1 cent per point from Chase and .6 cents per point from Amex. There are other ways to redeem points that may be more valuable to you but this should be the minimum value you get.

Both cards have annual fees so you should definitely do the math to see if you'll at least break even on the fee. If you won't break even or you don't use the spending categories that have bonuses you might prefer something simpler. Citi offers cash back cards for businesses that give 1.5% or 2% cash back on all purchases. The 2% comes with an annual fee so once again you'd need to do the math to figure out which one is right for you.

Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#93

Post by uiri »

ams6110 wrote: post #91
cmdrfred wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if the company goes belly up its possible that you'll end up holding the bag? That is horrifying coming from someone who has worked for mismanaged companies.

He's speaking about the person opening the credit card account in the business's name (generally the founder/owner/CEO etc.) As an employee using the company card you would not have personal liability.

An employee using the company card usually does have some personal liability for the card. Liability does not arise in the case mentioned above where the company goes bankrupt. However, if an employee makes unauthorized charges to a company card, the company can refuse to pay them as they do not fall underneath the company card policy. Those charges then become the employee's responsibility.

Be careful with company credit cards, even if you're only an employee!

Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#94

Post by caseysoftware »

primitivesuave wrote: post #75
caseysoftware wrote: post #7

Not card advice but operational advice: From being at startups where people tend to move fast and often move on, tell your staff that they can use the services they need BUT you will only reimburse them for 3 months. After that, it must be on the corp card. I've seen too many times where AWS, Mailchimp, etc, etc are on someone's personal card and once they leave, everything blows up after a couple months. It's even w…

I would never use any service under an employee's personal card. If someone needs something, it takes 10 minutes get someone with a company card to save it as a payment method and add it to a google spreadsheet. This also ensures that we know exactly how much we are spending and on what. In the past, I've worked at a company where each team managed their own expenses. This led to situations like one team using a cert…

In an ideal world, I fully agree with this.

In the short-term, get shit done world, sometimes things are messier and the edges are rougher and you need to allow for some of that.

My 3 month rule is good enough to evaluate, try it out, play with some ideas, get some feedback, and then scale or kill. If you kill it, expense it and you're done. If you scale it (aka operationalize it), move it to the corp account.

At Twilio, I saw this from both sides.. both as a purchaser and as an evangelist getting people to use our API.

Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#95

Post by amorphid »

Am also in San Francisco. In 2011, exactly one year after my bankruptcy, I got a Capital One card w/ a $750 credit limit and a $75 annual fee. Three months later I got a another Capital One card w/ a $2000 limit and no annual fee. I'm guessing Capital One is a great company to go with, especially when it's "live off credit cards" time and your credit rating is in the crapper :)

A less snarky answer is to join Credit Karma and see what they recommend. It's a great service for $0.

Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#96

Post by mrep »

larrysalibra wrote: post #55
jenamety wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this 2%. nerdwallet for help. I have yet to see anyone beat the 2% back other than bonus signons - but those are 1 time and on a 2-3 year horizon go with 2%. Fidelity has a 2% one as well that deposits cash into a fidelity investment account vs CapOne where you have to apply points to other transactions to utilize the full 2% back (and CapOne redemption only applies to certain Merchant Category Codes... FYI Timeshare…

If you're considering personal cards, USAA has 2.5% cash back on everything if you have a bank account + $1000/month direct deposit with them. http://usaa.com/limitless (limited to certain states)

You can only do that if you qualify for USAA though which means you need to be:

Active, retired and honorably separated officers and enlisted personnel of the U.S. military.

Officer candidates in commissioning programs (Academy, ROTC, OCS/OTS).

Adult children of USAA members who have or had a USAA auto or property insurance policy.1

Widows and widowers of USAA members who have or had a USAA auto or property insurance policy.

Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#97

Post by dbg31415 »

primitivesuave wrote: post #75
caseysoftware wrote: post #7

Not card advice but operational advice: From being at startups where people tend to move fast and often move on, tell your staff that they can use the services they need BUT you will only reimburse them for 3 months. After that, it must be on the corp card. I've seen too many times where AWS, Mailchimp, etc, etc are on someone's personal card and once they leave, everything blows up after a couple months. It's even w…

I would never use any service under an employee's personal card. If someone needs something, it takes 10 minutes get someone with a company card to save it as a payment method and add it to a google spreadsheet. This also ensures that we know exactly how much we are spending and on what. In the past, I've worked at a company where each team managed their own expenses. This led to situations like one team using a cert…

> I would never use any service under an employee's personal card. If someone needs something, it takes 10 minutes get someone with a company card to save it as a payment method and add it to a google spreadsheet. This also ensures that we know exactly how much we are spending and on what.

Totally agree. No reason to ever put something on an employee's personal card... way too many things could go wrong in that situation. Some examples I've seen over the years...

* Employee doesn't document the service... so like all of a sudden your Zapier / IFTTT / Unito / etc. account that was responsible for forwarding various emails to the right people just stops working because an employee left the company. You had no idea how they set it up, and without them you're stuck trying to re-build what they had done. You're boned if you don't make time to document how services work, and audit how they are paid for.

* Employee changes CC (less of an issue now since many recurring charges get updates to CC numbers) and doesn't realize they forgot to update the service... then a mission critical service fails. This happened to one of my clients back when Costco changed from Amex to Visa... the auto-update didn't work across card carriers, and the employee had all the emails from that service provider going into his spam folder... and presto our project management software stopped working for a day. A stitch in time saves nine... Make time to use the company card.

* Employee with the payment card can often call customer support and gain owner-level privileges, even assuming they didn't start with them. If others on the team don't realize this... it can cause drama. Saw this happen a few times with Slack accounts at various companies. One employee started a company Slack... to try it out... ended up getting the free credits they used to (maybe still do) offer, upgrading to paid account... and then being a super admin. We had to go to the employee and get them to transfer account ownership to a company official so they couldn't just change the CEO's email to their own, reset the password, and get access to conversations they shouldn't have access to. Again... this all takes A LOT more time than just using the company card.

* Employee leaves the company, loses access to email address, can't cancel the account that has the CC... gets stuck with a huge bill they can't cancel without canceling their CC. Was an easy fix, but just an awkward situation -- nobody had been using the service since the employee left, and since his card was on auto-pay he didn't notice the $150 / month charge for over a year. At that point his email address was long gone, we had to re-create it, reset the password, get customer support to cancel the account... total waste of a day for someone. We reimbursed the employee, but we had no way of getting a refund from the service provider.

* Employee maxes out credit. Put AWS on your personal CC... have a swing month... boom you max out the credit card the employee had... who knows what other debt he was carrying, or what his limit was... or what the fraud triggers are on some no-name credit union card... it's a huge risk to leave this sort of thing up to your employee... some services will give you notice (again, that requires you having the emails go to the right people), but some will just cut you off. Huge risk to your company introducing this many unknowns.

Final reason... because of perks an employee gets for using their personal card. This simply isn't fair to other employees... these rewards are a form of compensation... you don't want to have a policy that allows people benefits for not using the company card as that's a conflict of interest. Having a policy that requires people to get the service approved, documented, and on the company card will always save you time. "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast..." etc. Even for startups, letting people use personal cards is a horrible horrible idea. Take 10 minutes... do it right.

Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#98

Post by kalmari »

ams6110 wrote: post #86
pbreit wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you not have access to the departed employee's email account? I have never seen that as an actual issue.

If they used a personal credit card, maybe they used personal email as well? There are a lot of people at my work who use their personal gmail for everything.

maybe but dont count on it. compartmentalization is a thing as well as temp and prepaid credit services.

Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#99

Post by primitivesuave »

caseysoftware wrote: post #94
primitivesuave wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never use any service under an employee's personal card. If someone needs something, it takes 10 minutes get someone with a company card to save it as a payment method and add it to a google spreadsheet. This also ensures that we know exactly how much we are spending and on what. In the past, I've worked at a company where each team managed their own expenses. This led to situations like one team using a cert…

In an ideal world, I fully agree with this. In the short-term, get shit done world, sometimes things are messier and the edges are rougher and you need to allow for some of that. My 3 month rule is good enough to evaluate, try it out, play with some ideas, get some feedback, and then scale or kill. If you kill it, expense it and you're done. If you scale it (aka operationalize it), move it to the corp account. At Twi…

I think you have a valid point and in the grand scheme of things, SaaS accounting is hardly consequential to a company's success.

But even in reality I would be worried about a management team that doesn't pay attention to control of a company's technical infrastructure. Having business expenses fall neatly under one bank account is not a complicated responsibility and doesn't get in the way of a "get shit done" attitude.

Re: Ask HN: What credit card does your US startup use?

#100

Post by caseysoftware »

imjustsaying wrote: post #79
caseysoftware wrote: post #7

Not card advice but operational advice: From being at startups where people tend to move fast and often move on, tell your staff that they can use the services they need BUT you will only reimburse them for 3 months. After that, it must be on the corp card. I've seen too many times where AWS, Mailchimp, etc, etc are on someone's personal card and once they leave, everything blows up after a couple months. It's even w…

Whoa, I think OP is talking about which corporate credit card to use. Using a personal credit card of an employee sounds like an absolute nightmare. I know startups are strapped for cash, but damn.

It's not about being broke. It's about:

"I need this tool to solve this problem right now. I can either go bug someone for the credit card and get off track or pull out my own card, get onto putting out the next fire, and settle the cash later."

And as I noted, it's not a long term thing.. it's to allow experimentation in the moment.

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