Specialist Services: Accepting Purchasing Card

If you supply the public sector (The Visa Government Procurement Card is a Purchasing card) or major UK corporations you may be asked to accept purchasing cards.

HM Customs & Excise has agreed that, in most cases, invoices do not have to be issued for Purchasing card transactions as the invoicing is undertaken by your customer's card issuer. However, when you process a purchasing card payment you will be prompted to key in information that you would usually record on your VAT invoice.

More information can be found from our Accepting Purchasing Cards leaflet. If you would like a copy of this leaflet please telephone the Streamline Help desk.

The APACS UK Card Expenditure statistics for May 2007 reveals that:

• Total spending on plastic cards was £28.6bn:
  • £18.7bn debit cards
  • 9.8bn credit cards
• Total number of transactions 405million:
  • 405m debit cards
  • 157m credit cards

Source APACS 2007 www.apacs.org.uk (Association for Payment Clearing Services)

You may also be interested as an additional source of information in the Official UK Government Procurement Card (GPC) Benchmarking Site.