How I Use My Small Business Credit Card for Assisted Living
Nov 01, 2024
Running an assisted living business can be tricky, especially when it comes to money. It's even harder when you're managing your business from far away. For my facilities, I've found that small business credit cards are super helpful. In this blog, I'll share how we use these cards to make our business run smoothly.
Check out the video too:
Why Use a Business Credit Card?
Business credit cards are great for assisted living facilities because:
- You can earn rewards
- It's easier to track spending
- You don't have to worry about cash all the time
For us, with many facilities in different states, credit cards make buying things much easier.
Setting Up Credit Cards for Each Facility
Here's how we do it:
- Each facility has its own credit card
- Only the facility manager can use the card
- We set clear rules about how to use the card
At first, one of our facilities had a card with a low spending limit. This caused problems when we needed to buy a lot of stuff. So, we got a second card to solve this issue. You can also work with the creditor to raise your limits if needed.
Managing Credit Cards from Far Away
You might wonder how we keep track of all these cards when we're not there. Here's our secret:
- We have clear rules (like asking permission for purchases over $300)
- We check the card statements often (at least once a month)
- If we see something weird, we ask about it right away
Keeping Track of Receipts and Payments
To stay organized:
- Managers scan and upload all receipts to Google Drive (you could use any software for this though)
- We set up automatic payments to pay off the full balance each month, or if you want more control, you can check it yourself often
- This helps us avoid interest and is good for our business credit
Using Credit Card Rewards
One of the best things about business credit cards is the rewards. We've earned lots of points over the years. We use these for:
- Travel expenses
- Cash back at stores like Sam's Club and Costco
- Paying the card balance
- Other business costs
These rewards have helped us save a lot of money!
Building Business Credit
Using credit cards responsibly helps build our business credit. This is important because:
- It can help us get loans in the future
- We might get better interest rates
- It shows that our business is trustworthy
To build good business credit, we:
- Pay our bills on time
- Keep our credit utilization low
- Regularly check our credit reports
Wrapping Up
Using small business credit cards for our assisted living facilities has been really helpful. It makes managing money easier, even when we're far away. With clear rules, regular checks, and smart spending, we've made it work well for us. Plus, the rewards are a great bonus!
If you’re ready to take your assisted living business to the next level, I recommend downloading our Business Plan Checklist. It’s a comprehensive tool that will guide you through creating a solid business plan, which is essential for securing financing, finding the right property, and ultimately running a successful assisted living facility.
Need help figuring out where to start? Join the next Roadmap Challenge and build your launch plan with me.
Show full transcript 👇
Transcript
00:00:00
dang it we did some research and we determined that using a business credit card was the right decision for our assisted living business but how do we do that when i'm not the one using the card on a daily basis and when i'm living out of state we'll get into that in today's video hi everybody i'm brandon gustafson i own and operate two assisted living facilities and i created this channel to help people just like you learn the ins and outs of investing in assisted living welcome to assisted
00:00:26
living investing [Music] hey everybody welcome back to the channel in our last video we talked about how do credit card rewards work for a small business uh go ahead and watch that and comment down below if you have experience working with the point system with your credit card for your small business i'd love to hear about that today i'm going to get into how i use it for my personal business how do i use it for my assisted living facilities and what's that process like i've talked
00:01:00
about this before and i'll link it up above our facilities are out of state so i'm not the one that's purchasing items i have my administrators doing it so who has access to our cards each of our facilities has their own separate card in each of those separate cards at each facility this is because we have two separate entities and i've talked about how i set up my entities in a previous video so go ahead and watch that so you can learn a little bit about that process but at each of our
00:01:29
facilities the facility administrator is the only person who has access to that card and at one of our facilities we actually have multiple cards and this is because we had a really low limit on our credit card initially and we were often hitting that limit um so the way a credit card works is they'll give you you know a 5 000 limit and if you get up to that point you can't spend any more money they'll block you from spending and so we were trying to spend on on a few things and we just kept hitting that
00:01:57
limit and it was really becoming an issue for us because we had a low limit i think it was like fifteen hundred two thousand dollars uh really low and so until we could get that fixed we were running into those issues so what we decided to do was get a separate card um that would allow us to have some flexibility float some of that money a little bit and get it to the point where we didn't have to rely on our administrator to use personal funds and then reimburse them for the things that they were purchasing
00:02:27
um so that's how we kind of handled that we had the money to pay down the card the problem is it kind of can take them a few days to process that payment and so we would get to the point was like okay we hit the limit i'm gonna pay it off but it's we're not gonna have funds available for two or three days how are we gonna handle that um and you know what's that gonna be like so our our response was let's just get an extra card it's going to help us avoid that issue and then i also called the credit card
00:02:55
company and talked to them about that situation you know we're an assisted living facility we have to buy large amounts of groceries on a pretty regular basis i need to increase my credit limit and we were able to get that done um so we have a higher credit limit on that card now that was the issue previously and we have an extra card and that allows us to kind of um work through that so work through your situation and i'm sure some of you are like oh my gosh he has two credit cards at one facility
00:03:23
how the heck is how how are they handling this and there's another one for the other facility there's three credit cards that's a lot of balls in the air to juggle for me um personally it's it's not a problem i i have a lot of experience working with credit cards and and kind of understanding how they work and how to stay on top of them and things like that so it's not a problem for me that might be different for you so take your personal situation into consideration i talked
00:03:48
about that in a previous video how to decide if a credit card is right for you so go ahead and watch that video for more information there now how do we monitor that usage one of the first things that that we did when we gave our facility administrator the business credit card was to give them some guidance on spending limits for example we said on purchases other than grocery we need to give you permission for anything that you spend over three hundred dollars and then also if it's like a repair
00:04:17
something goes out we need at least two quotes in order to review that and approve it to make sure we're getting a good price on it so we review those credit card purchases on a monthly basis as we're reconciling our books and often this happens more frequently as well so i would say at least do it on a monthly basis but sometimes we're doing this weekly or bi-weekly so just be in there consistently make sure that you're aware of the different things that are going on and if we have a question we just ask
00:04:45
our administrator hey what was this you spent fifty dollars at this place it doesn't seem right like it looks like you got gas here what happened um and it's either you know we did it the wrong way or we had approved a purchase for them two months ago to get gas for taking a residence somewhere or something like that and it was okay so and we also asked them to scan their receipts into a google drive folder which will help stay on top of those purchases i'm going to talk about that in a future video so i'm going to link
00:05:13
that up here once it's available for you and then paying off the card so now that we have sufficient funds in the bank it's easy for us to kind of we've set up the cards to pay it down on autopay on a pay that full balance down on a monthly basis i'll even sometimes go in there and just kind of pay it down a little more quickly so that we don't have to worry about it in the beginning it was difficult i had to go in probably on a weekly basis and get that down because of that credit
00:05:40
limit and so we're just paying that down on a on a really regular basis and then we got into a flow of this is how much we're spending this is the credit limit i think we're okay now and we haven't run into any issues for quite a while on that but i'll also just kind of go in there and just check the balance and just see how it is and check some of the purchases make sure everything is is how we would expect it to be and do that every couple of weeks it's always good to just keep an eye on what is going on
00:06:05
with your card now as far as points each of our cards do have rewards which is great we have cashback rewards cards with sam's club and costco just depending on which of those clubs and warehouses are are near to us and then we also have a card with a rewards system that is for travel that we use when we fly out to colorado over the last year that we've owned our facilities we've actually accumulated quite a bit of reward points which is great um you know we have enough that we could fly out to colorado and stay there
00:06:38
for a few days um or or something like that which is just awesome that it just has allowed us to to be able to do that and i've talked a lot about points i'll reference that up above and just kind of how you can use them and how you can take advantage of it so that's how we use our our credit card points and how we use our credit card for our business comment down below if you use it in a different way or if you have questions about it i'd love to hear from you on that next time i'm going to start getting
00:07:05
into some of the business the online business tools that are available to you as a small business owner that you can access and use for free and help you operate your business there are a lot of tools out there so i'm going to start getting into that in the upcoming videos and i hope that's going to be helpful for you to learn more about investing in assisted living make sure you visit me on assistedlivinginvesting.net i have free content over there a blog you can set up a consulting cod love to
00:07:29
have conversations with you and help you on your journey help you be successful and just follow me on my other social media platforms as well and remember it doesn't take a lot just a little bit keep making progress step by step by step it doesn't take a lot just just a little bit if you are consistent i promise you that you will be successful thanks for watching and have a great day [Music]
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