The credit card is very important to our business and as such I keep a close eye on the balance. An odd charge showed up and our Discover Card was locked down till the charge was verified. My first thought was “How do they know?” We travel all over the country and most of my shopping is done on line or in a local store in the vicinity we are parked. Our spending is very random.
Discover sent an email alerting me to an odd charge. Immediately I went online to my account and the evening before there was two large charges and two small charges that were pending. I called Discover and after verifying who I was they asked about the charges. I said one was mine, and she said we are not questing that charge we are questioning the other three. Wow, I was impressed and I said no, those three are not mine. She said no problem we will take care of those but, we have to close this card down and issue you another credit card with a new number. That was all I had to do and the problem was taken care of. If I had used a debit card the problem would not have been this easy to solve.
We knew it was going to be awhile before we got home so we had to go to our backup plan. First were some things could wait before we purchased them. If we would have had to make a big purchase we could call our bank and let them know about the purchase so they could raise the limit of our cards and our daily spending limit. Our local bank is very good about working with us.
Credit cards can wreak havoc on a budget if not used wisely. The credit card is not free money and if not repaid each month can really eat into your income. How I keep up with credit card use is to enter each item into my Quicken under the credit card account and also keep a running line item in my business name as money spent. When the credit card is due I have the money set aside.
This was the first time we had fraudulent purchases on a card and I am very thankful that the charges were on the Discover card and handled as quickly and easily as they were. Protecting our business finances is very important and this was an excellent reminder of when things go wrong it is great to have this kind of protection.