Starting Up a Couriers Business - The Boxby Tips for Survival during a Credit Crunch.

(6) Managing Your Courier Business Expenses

If you have drivers, the you will need to give the drivers an allowance, or cash advance for all of the necessary expenses that they are going to incurr during the course of their deliveries.  Common expenses will be things such as Fuel, Oil, Bridge & Road tolls, Congestion Charges, Overnight accomodation expenses, phone topups and probably many others.

There are two traditional methods of managing this, the first is that you reimburse your driver when they get back, that they prepare an expense claim form and submit this to you, and normally, this will either be paid from petty cash, or together with their wages into the bank.

The other method is that you give your driver a cash float, and that they top this up as required.

The problem with all of this is that cash expenses are less trackable, and that cash itself is higher risk than the usual electronic formats of payment that we are now used to.

Another common option is to get a business chargecard for your drivers.  This acts similar to a credit card, your employees charge the expenses to the card during the month, and at the month end the full balance is taken by direct debit from your bank account.  This ensures that there is never any debt building up on the card, but it does mean that you may get a big bill at the end of the month.

One service new to the market is absolutely perfect for managing courier drivers and their expenses & floats, and this is a prepaid maestro card.  As the card is a maestro card then it is accepted pretty much everywhere in the UK, for bridges, tolls, congestion charges as well as fuel stations, hotels & resturants.

With a Prepaid Maestro Card you can enjoy all the benefits of a Maestro® card with no credit check, no interest payments and no surprises. Maestro is a European wide accepted card, so you can even precharge it for your drivers to use on european delivery runs.  A lot easier to manager than Euro kitties, and it can easily be stopped/cancelled if it gets lost - unlike cash advances.

Prepaid Maestro cards also mean that you can charge it up with funds when it suits you, and not be subject to perhaps large payments disappearing out of your bank account at the end of each month.

As a Bread card lets you view your transactions online, then you always have full information on what your drivers are spending your money on.  You also have online something that you can check their receipts against, making sure that you are infact paying only for proper business expenses.  And because it's all prepaid, there is no debt associated with this, meaning that you will never be outstanding to the bank, the card, or your drivers for expenses.