Company is late in paying my corporate credit card statement - will it hurt my credit?
"According to an article on Bankrate.com from 2011, yes, it can hurt your credit: With individual liability accounts, the employee holds all responsibility for the charges, even if the company pays the issuer directly. Joint liability means the company and employee share the responsibility for payments, says Mahendra Gupta, author of the RPMG survey. In both cases, if the card isn't paid and the account becomes delinquent, it will pop up on the employee's credit report and dent his or her credit score, says Barry Paperno, consumer affairs manager at myFICO.com. It doesn't matter if the company was supposed to make the payment; the repercussions fall on the employee. ""It will impact your score no differently than if you were late on one of your own accounts,"" Paperno says. Usually, with corporate credit cards, the employee is liable along with the employer for charges on the card.  The intent is to provide the employee with an incentive not to misuse the card.  However, this can be a problem if your company is late in paying bills. In the distant past, I had a corporate credit card.  I was not supposed to have to pay the bill, but I did receive a bill in the mail every month.  And occasionally, the payment was late.  In my case, these late payments never showed up on my credit report.  I can't remember now whether or not this card was reported on my credit report at all.  And I remember being told when I got the card that I was jointly responsible for the card with the company. However, your experience may be different.  Do the on-time payments show up on your credit report?  If so, that may be an indication that a late payment might appear." After doing some investigating, my employers contract with the credit card company has a clause that basically specifies that despite my name being on the credit card, and bills being sent to me, all liability is on the company. Additionally, the employer reserves the right to garnish wages in the event of a balance on the card. So it looks like it won't affect my credit score. I appreciate all of the advice.
The SCHUFA in Germany works a bit different from the FICO score in the US. My background: I am a German currently living in the US. The information others want to see from the SCHUFA are a bit different. If you want to example rent a house or an apartment, the landlord often wants to see a SCHUFA statement which only shows that there are no negative entries. This statement you can get easily from online and they don't mention your credit score there. If you apply for a real credit or want to lease a car, they want to look deeper in your SCHUFA profile. However, very important is: They need signed permission to do this. Every participating company can submit entries to your profile where the score is calculated from. For example mobile phone plans, leasing a car, applying for a loan. Some lenders decide on the score itself, some on the overall profile and some also take your income into account. Since there is no hire & fire in Germany you are often asked to show your last 3 paychecks. This, in combination with your SCHUFA score is used for determination if you are eligible for a loan or not. However, they check through every entry which is made there and as long as it is reasonable and fits to your income (car for 800 EUR/month with a 1000 EUR salary does not!) you should not have a problem establishing a good score. The, in my eyes, unfair part about Schufa is that they take your zip code and your neighborhood into account when calculating their score. Also moving often affects the score negatively. To finally answer your question: Credit history is also built by mobile phone plans etc. in Germany. As long as you pay everything on time you should be fine. A bad score can definitely hurt you, but it is not as important to have a score as it is in the US because the banks also determine your creditworthiness based on your monthly income and your spending behavior. "First, a note of my personal experience: up until a year ago, my credit lines were composed exclusively of credit cards with perfect payment histories, and my credit score is fine. If you mean that credit cards have no impact on a person's credit score until they miss a payment, that is certainly not correct. FICO's website identifies ""payment history"" as 35% of your FICO score: The first thing any lender wants to know is whether you’ve paid past credit accounts on time. This is one of the most important factors in a FICO® Score. ... Credit payment history on many types of accounts Account types considered for payment history include: ... Details on late or missed payments (""delinquencies"") and public record and collection items FICO® Scores consider: How many accounts show no late payment A good track record on most of your credit accounts will increase your FICO® Scores. Clearly, from the last item alone, we see that credit lines (a category which includes credit cards) with no late payments is a factor in computing your FICO score, and certainly other credit bureaus behave similarly. Possibly the banker was trying to explain some other point, like ""If you're careful not to spend more on your card than you have in the bank, you can functionally treat your credit card as a debit line,"" but did so in a confusing way." I was hoping to comment on the original question, but it looks to me like the asker lives in the EU, where credit cards are a lot less common and a lot of the arguments (car rental, building up of credit etc) brought forward by people living in the US just don't apply.  In fact especially airlines (and other merchants) will charge you extra when using a credit card instead of a debit card and this can add up fairly quickly. I hold a credit card purely for travelling outside the EU and occasionally I will travel for work and make my own arrangements, then it can come in handy as I am able to reclaim my expenses before I have to pay my credit card bill (in this case I will also claim the extra credit card fees from my employer). This however is for my personal convenience and not strictly necessary. (I could fill out a bunch of paperwork and claim the costs from my employer as an advance.) In the EU I find that if my VISA debit card will not work in a shop, neither will my credit card, so on that note it's pretty pointless. So to answer the asker question: If you live (and travel) in the EU  you don't need a credit card, ever. If you travel to the US, it would be advantageous to get one. Occasionally banks will offer you a credit card for free and there's no harm in taking it (apart from the fact that you have one more card to keep track off), but if you do, set up a direct debit to pay it off automatically.  And as other people have said: Don't spend money you don't have. If you are not absolutely sure you can't do this, don't get a credit card. Unfortunately not. Even if the credit card balance is positive (i.e. customer has overpaid the credit card account), you cannot withdraw cash (for free) - as any cash withdrawal is subject to 12.9% interest - even if repaid in full at the end of the month! The clarity credit card is one of the best cards for overseas spending, as its load free (no fees for purchases abroad) and it gives near perfect exchange rates. If your balance is positive, you start at £0, then fund that credit card account from your bank account £500. You can then spend on your credit card, and when your next bill is due at the end of the month - they will use that extra £500 sitting in your account first, and ask for the remainder from you. i.e.  scenario1:  scenario 2: It is better in my opinion, to set up a direct debit to always clear out the full amount on your credit card. That way, you have cash in your bank account for emergencies (getting £500 back from a credit card will take a few days to process as opposed to having the ability to withdraw cash from the cashpoint 24/7). And once the direct debit is paid automatically at the end of the month, there are no fees - voila your credit card is almost like a debit card, spend on it when you like, it gets paid automatically, no hassle, no worries. This approach does take a careful mindset though, as you need to know your credit limits and also you need to ensure your bank account has enough to pay off the direct debit at the end of the month. Otherwise those darn fees will get you (and hurt your credit rating). For cash spending, you will want to either take cash with you (check online here for best rates & get the money well in advance to avoid fees). Also in some countries the exchange rate is better there, than in the UK, google will help you here. If you dont like the idea of carrying large sums of cash with you can use a prepaid card like CaxtonFX, which is one of the better ones out there. The other well known ones are FairFX and Travelex Cash Passport. If it is a well known company that wants to give you a refund, I would not worry about giving them your credit card number.  However, I would never type my credit card number into an e-mail message. E-mail messages are very insecure, and can be read by many people along its way to the destination. They also can be archived in many places, meaning that your number will continue to be posted out there for someone to grab in the future.  If you need to give this company your credit card number, do it over the phone.  Having said that, ultimately you are not generally responsible for fraudulent charges if your card number is stolen and misused. I've had so many fraudulent charges, despite my being relatively careful with my number, that I don't really worry much anymore about losing my number. I just check my statement for false charges, and when they happen,  the bank cancels the charge and issues me a new number. It has happened to either my wife or I maybe 5 times over the last two years. "The short answer is no, it's probably not ok. The longer answer is, it might be, if you are very disciplined.  You need to make sure that you have enough money to pay off the card after a year, and that you pay the card on time, every month, without exception.  There may also be balance transfer or other fees that only make it worth while if the interest rate or balance on the other loan is high. The problem is most of these offers will raise your rates to very high levels (think 20% or more) if you are even one day late with one payment.  Some of them also will back charge you interest starting from day one, although I have only seen this on store credit ""one year, same as cash"" type offers.   In the end you need to balance the possible payoff against how much it will cost you if you do it wrong.  Remember, the banks are not in the business of lending out free money.  They wouldn't do this unless enough people didn't pay it back in one year for them to make a profit." You definitely have an argument for getting them to reverse the late fee, especially if it hasn't happened very often. (If you are late every month they may be less likely to forgive.) As for why this happens, it's not actually about business days, but instead it's based on when they know that you paid. In general, there are 2 ways for a company to mark a bill as paid: Late Fees: Some systems automatically assign late fees at the start of the day after the due date if money has not been received. In your case, if your bill was due on the 24th, the late fee was probably assessed at midnight of the 25th, and the payment arrived after that during the day of the 25th. You may have been able to initiate the payment on the company's website at 11:59pm on the 24th and not have received a late fee (or whatever their cutoff time is). Suggestion: as a rule of thumb, for utility bills whose due date and amount can vary slightly from month to month, you're usually better off setting up your payments on the company website to pull from your bank account, instead of setting up your bank account to push the payment to the company. This will ensure that you always get the bill paid on time and for the correct amount. If you still would rather push the payment from your bank account, then consider setting up the payment to arrive about 5 days early, to account for holidays and weekends. Mostly ditto to Dillip Sarwate. Let me just add: I don't know how you're making your payments, whether through the biller's web site, your bank's web site, by mail, in person, etc. But whatever the mechanism, if there is a chance that waiting until the due date to pay may mean that you will miss the due date: don't. The cost of a late payment charge is likely to far exceed any interest you would collect on your savings. Bear in mind that we are talking pennies here. I don't know how much the monthly bills that we are discussing here come to. Say it's $3,000. I think that would be a lot for most people. You say you're getting 3.6% on your savings. So if, on the average, you pay a bill 2 weeks later than you might have, you're getting an extra 2 / 52 x 3.6% x $3,000 in interest, or $4 per month. I think the last time I paid a late fee on a credit card it was $35, so if you make one mistake every 8 months and end up getting a late fee it will outweigh any savings.  Personally, I pay most of my bills through either my bank's web site or the biller's web site. I schedule all payments when I get a paycheck, and I generally try to schedule them for 1 week before the due date, so there's plenty of breathing room.