Don’t Be Afraid of Ghost Cards

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Don’t Be Afraid of Ghost Cards

October 31, 2007

Happy Halloween! Today is a good day to talk about a certain kind of purchasing card—the “ghost” card. We recently asked AP pros: What has been the best idea you’ve used over the past year to improve your AP department’s operations? Here’s one answer: “We implemented paying some of our largest vendors via credit cards called ‘ghost’ cards,” reports an AP manager at a manufacturing company (19 full-time employees in AP).

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Regarding "ghost" cards, my experience with them was a nightmare. Over time we eliminated all of them. The problem is with reconciliation. The statement is so large and no one at corporate wanted to validate of the purchases. We went to Special Purpose Accounts (SPAs) with GE Money issued to each corporate department. All purchases went through that department's administrative staff. Reconcillation was smaller, more manageable and always signed off by the department VP. We also were implementing A/P batch processing using GE's vPayment Process.

HSTATON on November 1
With your ghost cards, it sounds like purchasers were unable to designate a dept. or cost center when placing the order, so the statement was not segregated. Is that right?

ADZAMBA on November 1
Yes. This is another problem with ghosts. We could default code any type card (Individual, Ghost, or SPA)for SAP as to Company Code, Cost Center, Profit Center, & GL Code. This info showed up in the transaction detail of the accounting system (SAM for GE)when the transaction arrived. It had to be manually set if any of the default information recorded did not match that particular purchaser. So, before uploading (or mapping) to SAP you have to track down that type information.

HSTATON on November 2