How to Allocate Credit P Card Transactions on Visa Information Management

If you use a Visa P-Card for miscellaneous purchases at work, your accounting and finance office will want to know where to charge the expenses. If you are using Visa Information Management (informationmangement.visa.com) you can easily allocate your costs to specific department codes and cost centers right online. Your accounting department can then easily capture these cost allocations.

This might vary for different organizations. I've only used Visa Information Management online here at my current job. Hopefully it will work for you as well.

This article will teach you how to Allocate P Card Transactions online using Visa's Information Management system.

Keep in mind that you'll need to be set up by Visa first to use this system. I do not know the commercial aspects of doing this as I am not the administrator of this system.  Your accounting department or credit card / banking company can assist you with this.

First go to the  Visa Information Management site and log in.   Different companies apply different rules but be careful to not enter the wrong info during log in too many times or you'll be kicked out of your log in. Then you'll need to see your account administrator (typically a person in your own organization to correct this)

Click the "Visa Information Source" link on the page that appears after log in. This is pictured at the top of this article.

Look to the top of your computer monitor and put your cursor over "Cost Allocation" then choose "Allocation Transactions" in the drop down box that appears.

The next window that appears will filter your transactions so that you only see the charges (and credits if applicable) that you want to work on allocating.

For me, I make sure the "Billing Cycle" field is on "Billing" and then I select a "Start Date" to indicate the first record I want to look at, then I select an "End Period" for the last date I want to look at.

You might want to filter this a bit more or a bit differently depending on your allocation/billing needs.

Your "Allocate Transactions" page will appear. What I do, and again this may differ for you, is I'll look to the right column and find any transaction that is "Auto Allocated" for me, this is a trigger to indicate I have not done any thing with this credit card transaction. I still need to manually charge this to a department code and cost center.

Then I go all the way over to the left side of the page and check off the box for the transaction I want to code for costing.

Then I go all way to the bottom left side of the screen where I select "View/Allocate" then click the "Go" Button

A new page will appear. Look down into the "Allocations" section.  See the field next to the question mark "?" ?  If you know you department codes, cost center numbers, etc by heart, you can just enter them here.    What I prefer to do it click the question mark "?"  If you do this, a new window will pop up and you can then either:

1. Manually enter the codes here  or, what I prefer

2. Click the question marks next to those fields and the choose the right account codes.  Then Click "OK"

Then click the "Save and Submit" button on the previous window / page and you should be all set.

Repeat as necessary

Say you have one charge where the cost should be against or allocated to one or more departments. You'll need to 'split' the transaction if you need to charge multiple accounts on one transaction.

I did a separate article on that and linked the post below.