Pay by Credit Card & Keep the Detail
More companies are leaning on credit cards or P-cards to manage vendor payments. The reasons vary—cash flow timing, rewards, simplified processing—but the challenge is the same: how do you make sure you’re still tracking vendor spend properly inside SyteLine®?
Because whether you’re paying by check, ACH, or plastic, you don’t want to lose visibility into what you’re buying, from whom, and at what price. That detail is what gives you leverage later when vendors push price increases or when you’re negotiating volume discounts.
Option 1: Track at the Vendor Level
This approach mirrors your standard purchasing workflow:
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Create a PO for goods and services.
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Receive the items.
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Voucher the PO just like any other vendor transaction.
At this point, the process diverges:
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Assign a special bank code (e.g.,
VCCorCC1) to the vendor so payments route through a clearing account, not cash. -
Generate payments as normal—but instead of crediting cash, you credit the clearing account tied to your credit card liability.
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Record a voucher for the credit card vendor equal to those payments, debiting the clearing account and crediting AP.
Result: Your AP to the original vendor is cleared, your spend detail lives at the vendor level, and the liability shifts to your credit card vendor. Clean audit trail, full vendor history.
Option 2: Book at the Credit Card Vendor Only
The simpler route skips vendor-level tracking entirely:
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Post a single voucher for the card vendor when the statement arrives.
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Distribute charges by expense account—either in summary (one line per GL account) or in detail (one line per transaction).
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Payments post against cash when the CC vendor is paid.
Result: Streamlined processing, but you lose the ability to analyze purchases by vendor in SyteLine® itself. You’ll rely on the card statement and/or issuer for that context.
Hybrid Approach
Many companies land in the middle:
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High-value or contract vendors stay at the PO/vendor-level process for pricing and volume analysis.
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Low-value or incidental spend gets summarized on the card vendor voucher.
That way, you get visibility where it matters most without creating unnecessary work for a $25 office supply charge.
Bottom Line
There’s no single “right” choice—it’s about the trade-off between detail vs simplicity.
- If negotiating leverage, vendor performance tracking, or spend analysis are priorities → stick with vendor-level.
- If efficiency is the bigger concern → the credit card vendor route may be enough.
Most organizations end up with some flavor of hybrid.
This entry is posted. See you in the next journal.
