Tips For Handling Your Finances On The Go

This post comes from the NerdWallet.com team of financial bloggers and experts in helping consumers find the best rewards credit cards.

When you’re away from your office, the efficiency of your daily record keeping can suffer. Travelers who have to manage paperwork, pay bills, and deal with other office duties while running for a flight will likely find it to be a great hassle. But when it comes down to it, these tasks have to be dealt with. Taking care of your finances while on the go is a challenge, but there are some things that travelers can do to make managing money easier while on the road.

Strategies for Using Credit Cards

There are multiple ways you can make use of your credit cards for managing your finances while on the go. For instance, automated and online bill payments can be of great assistance. You’ll just have to make sure that the payment frequency is under your control and not just at the discretion of the business that you’re making a payment to, so that you can schedule and cancel payments at your will. Most businesses are above board on this, but there are situations where a merchant or creditor could repeatedly ding you for the same service, and even claim that you still owe them when you don’t.

Using credit cards can also save you time and money by giving you a cushion of protection from problematic purchases. For instance with Amex, you are given purchase and return protection, which allows you to return items that have exceeded a store’s 14-30 day return policy, and return some items up to 90 days after buying them (note: return protection is only available in the USA). This can come in handy when you’re on the road for a few weeks and are unable to return things before the manufacturer return policy expires. Purchase protection can also safeguard you when something you have purchased is broken or stolen. Amex will give you a replacement or refund on specific products within 90 days of purchase.

Scanning Your Receipts

It seems that no matter how hard we try to prepare, there always seems to be a fair amount of paperwork that needs to be taken care of. When you have to go on a business trip or deal with a big family move, it can cause a sheer chaos for your bookkeeping. To help reduce the amount of paperwork that you will have to deal with, you should keep your purchases on a dedicated personal or small business credit card.

For a technological solution, you can use Neat Receipts, which is a mobile scanning device and software that automatically extracts and organizes key information into a format that can be easily used for financial reports and reimbursement forms. You are also able to use it to scan business card data for events that would normally require you to take home a small box filled with contact info.

Using Cloud Storage

Say your only access to financial and other important data is on your computer’s hard drive and your files back home. In the event that you have a computer crash on the road, this could be a major setback, especially if you have billing issues to solve. With Jungle Disk, you will be able to digitally store data, and your hard drive is automatically backed up daily. Then if you’re unable to travel with your laptop, you can use the hotel’s business center to access your information. Another option to use is Dropbox, which allows you to sync files across multiple computers, and it’s free for small amounts of data. Saving web-based digital copies of account statements can save you a lot of time and money during travel and can prevent you from having problems with solving simple billing disputes.

The Oh-so-lovely Concierge Service

You can get a 24-hour concierge service from many credit cards, but not many people truly take advantage of it. For instance, with Visa Signature cards you are given this service free of charge. You can read a great article about this at Tim Ferriss’s blog. It talks about all the different types of services that concierge can take care of for you, freeing you up to tend to other important matters in your life. The most amazing part is that the author had a tougher time finding things that concierges wouldn’t do than things they could. In fact, we also recently had the Visa Signature concierge deliver flowers on Valentine’s Day in New York City, when no florist would take our calls.

No matter what your reason is for your travel or for being away from the office, it is important that you are able to efficiently handle your finances. Hopefully these tips will help to minimize your money management woes.

Editor's Note - NerdWallet is primarily focused on American credit cards, but you can click on the Canadian flag at the top of their site to see credit cards available to Canadians. HowToSaveMoney.ca also has a detailed credit cards section including a list of the best credit cards in Canada.