Credit cards can be a great way to get collections into your company sooner and eliminate some credit risk. However, some companies will just record the total amounts of credit card receipts into their general ledger for each day or perhaps for a whole monthly period depending upon the value. That’s fine for those purposes. However, for the detailed record keeping, I’d strongly consider downloading the details of the credit card transaction.

There can be a number of benefits for doing this:

1. You get the detail on who is paying by credit card. This will allow you to be able to match up against any credit request that might come up in the future.

2. It can help you reconcile to any questions that might come up from people who have questions about charges on their account and they can’t remember what the particular charge was.

3. You might get hit with charge back requests through your merchant account processor. Some may not be valid and having the detail gives you a basis for checking that out.

4. Usually, with the credit card detail you can also get some time information. For some businesses depending upon the volume, it could be interesting information to be able to track the amounts per time, such as per hour. This could help you plan for your business, such as for your customer service levels at different times and other support.

Those are just a few ideas that you can have. You might think of others.

It’s a good practice to get the detail on your credit card transactions. For most firms, downloading this into Excel will work out just fine. Sooner or later, that information could come pretty well in handy for you.