Every month, New Zealand business owners spend thousands of dollars on business expenses. But what if you could pay all your bills with your American Express and earn rewards points for business and first-class travel at the same time? With RewardPay, you can.
What is RewardPay?
RewardPay is a service that lets you pay the IRD, ACC and other business bills like suppliers, landlords and contractors with an Amex credit card, even if suppliers don't accept the card.
Each time you pay a business expense with your Amex you earn points that can be redeemed for travel or other rewards. RewardPay is the first and only service in New Zealand to offer this.
“This is a very quick and affordable way to earn a huge amount of points and take that overseas holiday you've always dreamt about,” says RewardPay CEO Mark Dawes. “If you are a business owner it really is a no-brainer.”
How it works
RewardPay essentially acts as a 'middleman' between a business and the third party they are paying. It accepts the Amex payment for a small processing fee (to the payer) and then pays the receiving party (supplier) directly.
The processing fee is 1.67% for IRD & government payments, and 2.35% for other business expenses.
However, as these amounts are pre-tax, the after-tax costs (and arguably true out-of-pocket) for IRD payments can fall to as low as 1.21% and 1.69% for other business expenses (based on companies paying 28% tax on profit).
RewardPay can also be used for payroll, provided your business has a New Zealand Business Number (NZBN) and is paying contractors. You can use RewardPay to pay your employees' PAYE payroll tax, and you can now pay tax pooling intermediaries using your AMEX.
The power of earning Reward Points
With RewardPay, you can pay all of your business bills - including IRD and ACC bills - using your Amex card and earn Amex Membership Reward Points or Air New Zealand Airpoint Dollars.
Combined with a high-points earning card (such as the AMEX Platinum Business Card), this can add up to millions of points a year with no cap or limit to how many you can earn.
“The good thing is that when you're processing business payments, they're typically pretty large payments, particularly tax payments. So you've got a good opportunity to earn a large amount of points in a very short amount of time,” says Dawes.
For example, a business owner paying $100,000 of GST and $200,000 of PAYE costs per year would pay $5,010 in RewardPay fees (1.67% of $300,000).
This spend would generate 600,000 Membership Reward Points, comfortably covering a return class trip from Auckland to Europe.
Managing cash flow with interest-free credit
More than simply boosting your rewards balance, RewardPay can also help free up cash flow, says Dawes.
“By using their Amex, RewardPay members can take advantage of up to 55-days interest-free credit to manage their cash flow, meaning they don't need to access a traditional line of credit or bank overdraft.
“For small and medium-sized business owners, this is so important because cash flow is the number one thing SMEs worry about and have to deal with all the time.
“This capability of being able to use RewardPay and pay suppliers that don't accept credit cards opens up a whole new world of places where you can actually take advantage of that interest free line of credit that you've got from American Express.”
RewardPay has been a partner of American Express for over 8 years, says Dawes.
Sign up to RewardPay before your next IRD payment
It costs nothing to sign up for RewardPay. Fees only apply when you set up a payment through our portal. Watch a video and see our pricing.