How does the US Government use Credit Cards?
The federal government reports that purchases under $2500 only comprised of 2% of the overall government spending, but did account for 85% all purchases. As the administrative costs of these small purchases often exceeded the actual dollar spend, the use of procurement cards increased in many government departments. One government agency, the Department of Commerce, estimated that the use of procurement cards saved them over $22 million per year on administrative costs and the reduction in purchasing processing time. The use of the cards has allowed purchasing departments to concentrate its efforts into the 15% of the total procurement spend that accounts for 98% of the total expenditure. The Visa Purchase Card is the most widely procurement card in the Federal government. Government financial reports indicate that in FY10, approximately 98.9M transactions were made and $30.2B were charged using the GSA SmartPay charge cards, creating $325.9M in refunds.
There are currently over 350 agencies/organizations participating in the program spending $30 billion annually, through 100 million transactions on over three million cards. The FY 2010 Procurement by credit card report showed the following:
| Charge Card Purchases | $ |
| Fleet Cardholders |
$632,537 |
| Fleet Spend |
$1,796,269,682 |
| Fleet Transactions |
$27,712,679 |
| Purchase Cardholders |
$256,978 |
| Purchase Spend |
$19,170,837,510 |
| Purchase Transactions |
$22,127,431 |
| Travel Cardholders |
$2,248,700 |
| Travel Spend |
$9,530,821,611 |
| Travel Transactions |
$49,984,737 |
Government contractors should able to accept credit card for payment and identify which agency contracting offices uses them. The Federal Marketing Plan will help companies market to those target markets.
Federal Contract Intelligence Service is a data mining company that specializes in tracking current and historical United States Government (USG) procurement statistics. We provide marketing list/reports to companies that want to do business with the federal government. Our clients use these list/reports to position their companies in front of decision makers before a requirement becomes an open bid solicitation.
Our marketing list/reports are tailored for the company’s products/services and matched with the decision makers within specific targeted agency contracting offices. We use state of the art data mining software and have access to data sets from Data.gov, Federal Procurement Data System, USA Spending and other data provided and updated by the USG. We also use data from fee based subscription services. Please see sample of our reports.