Recently, The Points Guy published a good piece about the difference between credit cards for small businesses and corporate cards.
The difference between these types of cards is an important distinction. My business (actually a nonprofit foundation) generates about $6-$8M per year in spending. When I became the Executive Director, I signed up for the Chase Ink Business Preferred card. I have the Chase Sapphire Reserve card as well, and I wanted to use Ultimate Rewards points to upgrade my staff, who usually travel a lot internationally.
Chase gave me the Ink Preferred card with a half-dozen of my staff as Authorized Users. All the UR points accrue to me, and I use them to upgrade flights for everyone. However, once we had the cards, I realized two things that I hadn't known before. First, Chase counts the $100K spending limit on the card against my overall credit exposure with their bank. So it has been difficult for me to obtain other Chase cards, since I've reached my personal credit exposure limit. I told Chase that in all fairness, if they're going to count the Ink Preferred card credit limit against my personal exposure, in all fairness they should also count my business revenue as part of my personal assets. But it doesn't work that way!
Second, as they mention in the article, all UR points earned by authorized user spending on the Ink Preferred cards accrue to me, not them. So my AUs can't use the UR points that their own spending generates! When I challenged Chase on that rule, they explained it was to "prevent fraud". To upgrade my AU's flights, I have to transfer the UR points to my own airline accounts and then upgrade my staff. That seems like an unnecessary workaround. As I told Chase, if I trust my staff to have AU cards, I ought to be able to trust them to accrue and spend their own UR points!
Because of these limitations, eventually we may make the switch to Chase corporate cards that earn UR points. But I like the earning rate on our Ink Preferred cards so for now we're keeping them.
