John Jonas walks through payment options for services your OFS needs: owner-paid cards often get declined for fraud, so you can ask them to set up accounts and send you billing links, or reimburse them for charges on their own cards. VPNs help avoid declines. Real-time coordination works for security codes. PayPal and Payoneer are alternatives. Monthly subscriptions cost more than annual.
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Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 32, Subscribing to Services for your OFS. So this is really interesting. I got this good question from Jared. He says thanks again for your emails and with all the tips and tricks. I'm curious how you deal with things or services that need to be paid for, like a service for your company or an item for your company online. Do you pay all of those yourself with a credit card? Do you get a prepaid card to your team member? Do they have a corporate card with a limit? Would love to know how you handle this. So here's how we've done this. We've done this quite a few different ways over the years. So we don't have a corporate card. I remember years ago giving my credit card to my ofs and it wouldn't work, probably because they were in the Philippines. So it gets declined. So fraud prevention methods around the world would detect, oh, this is a US Card and you're in the Philippines, and that's a problem. So the cards always got declined when they were using it. So then that frustrated me. So then for years, I would just do the signup process and give my team the username and password. So either. Either they would create the account and then they would give me the username and password. I would go in and I did this different ways. Over the years, I get less and less tolerant with having to deal with small things. It started off, they would say, hey, we need this service. And I'd be like, okay, and I go create the account and I would then pay for it, and then I'd give them the username and password for it. Then I started asking them to create the account. Then I started asking them to create the account and go to the billing page and send me the URL, because I don't want to figure it out. I just want you to send me the username and password and the billing page and I will go in and put my credit card in. And so that's where we ended up for a long time, but it still always bugged me because I don't want to be involved in small things that they should be able to take care of. So recently I've been giving my credit card again, and it's actually been working sometimes. So I think some of that is because my team members, they use a VPN when purchasing, which I will. I'll talk about in the coming days. So a VPN just allows them to use a US IP address when purchasing or actually an IP address anywhere in the world, depending on where the VPN is. So that when they buy something using my card, it doesn't raise the hey, you're out of the country red flags and so it doesn't get declined. Occasionally when they use my card, we coordinate schedules. Like they'll text me and say, hey, can I do this right now? That way we're both online at the same time and if I need to send them a security code, they get it right away so they can complete the purchase. And then we do this with text, usually through imessage because they either have an iPhone or a. An iPad or something like that, or with Voxer. I know some services are now used to having VAs subscribe for their clients and this happens often enough that their checkout processes are getting easier. For one time services where my OFS is having problems using my card, which still happens, they sometimes just use their credit card and that's usually not on a subscription. Then they send me the receipt and I reimburse them. However, just today one of my OFS said, hey, can I get reimbursed? This is the second month that I've paid for Grammarly, which we started using Grammarly. She's using it actually, she's using it with her team of people and she paid for it on her card. We reimbursed her the first month. She just got rebuilt the second month and she said, hey, can I get reimbursed for this again? And actually can we subscribe for a year because it's like 60% cheaper. And my business partner Dan said, oh, yeah, totally, and I'll just go and pay for that for the year. So it's not on your card anymore. So we were reimbursing her. She just used her credit card. Often they won't have a credit card. And some services take online payments through PayPal or Payoneer. PayPal and Payoneer have pretty solid relationships with local banks and cash apps. So some Filipinos will use this if they don't have a credit card. So there's lots of options for how you can do this. You can ask your OFS how they would like to handle it. They may just say, hey, I just want you to use your card. Or they may just say, hey, I already did it. I used my card. Can you reimburse me? It just kind of depends on your relationship with them and their comfort level. So. Talk to you later.
