Best Credit Card Statement Date

[dreamer76]

Hi everyone,  

So while this is not technically a Concur question, it is related to Concur Expense Management, and I see there is a lot of collective wisdom within this forum so hoping I can harass a little of that knowledge.  Please can you share with me what your credit card statement date is and the pros/cons of this date.  If you had the option to start again, what date would you pick?  Not sure, if it would change your decision but we have both PCards (paid by CBCP) and Travel Cards (paid by IBCP), so we could either use the same date for both or have two different dates.  

[Jeremy]

Hi @dreamer76 ,

This is a difficult question to answer and is very subjective.  Our Travel card cycle closes on the 22nd and our Pcard closes on the 13th.  They used to have the same date but in an effort to try and reduce the accrual file/process, we moved the Pcard to the middle of the month as we pull the Pcard extract one time on the last Wednesday of the fiscal month.  For the Travel card, as long as you are extracting and making payment to the card provider a minimum of 2 times per month, it should not matter what the cycle date is.  

It really is up to you if you use the same date for both card programs and then just try and find a date that looks like it will work best for your extract schedule and month end close.

[dreamer76 · Accepted solution]

Hi Jeremy, 

Yes, I agree, the more I think about this, the more I realise it is completely dependent on the organization, it's internal processes and preferences.  I guess a better question, might have been has anyone found any statement dates that don't work well.  Which you have already answered, by advising that having two separate dates for PCard and Travel card can be benefical.

Thanks so much for your reply. 

Kind regards, 

[DeanR]

I'm torn between two camps on this:

1. Our current statement date (23rd) works well with our accounting cycle as we can reasonably push our users to complete their reports by the end of the calendar month.  This means we're getting more accurate data in our accounting system than having to rely on Concur accrual reports for unsubmitted expenses.
2. On the other hand, I would like to have a statement date of the last day of the month so we could actually use Expense Assistant.  It's too confusing for our users as EA is aligned to calendar months and can't be changed, so it ends up creating two reports per card cycle that our users have to manually combine.