Pay from the company account: the payment trail rules

This is the mistake that costs companies the most money, and it is completely avoidable. The rule is short: money you want to claim back has to be paid from the Turkish company's own bank account or company card.

The reason is straightforward. The money is paid to the company, based on what the company spent. If it never left the company, there is nothing to pay back.

Why this catches people

Nobody breaks this rule on purpose. It happens because of how software companies buy things.

A founder sets up the Meta or Google Ads account during the first week of the business, before the company bank account exists, and leaves a personal card on file. Three years later that card is still there, quietly paying six figures a year of user acquisition that could have been reimbursed at 70%. The same thing happens with cloud accounts, App Store developer accounts, SaaS subscriptions and conference tickets.

The invoice is usually addressed correctly to the company. The bookkeeping is usually right, with the founder reimbursed through expenses. None of that helps, because the programme looks at the payment to the supplier, and that payment came from a personal card.

What counts as proof of payment

Three documents satisfy this, depending on how the money moved:

• a bank statement from the company's account showing the outgoing payment
• a SWIFT confirmation for an international transfer
• a company card statement, on a card issued against the company's account

Each of these has to sit alongside the invoice issued to the Turkish company and the contract, order confirmation or platform agreement behind it. A reviewer reads the three together and expects them to describe one transaction.

The payment date does more work than you think

Two separate things hang off the payment date rather than the invoice date.

The filing deadline runs six months from the payment document date. Where a document shows both a transaction date and a value date, the value date is the one that counts.

The exchange rate for a foreign-currency invoice is the Central Bank rate on the payment date. Since most studio spending is in dollars and support is paid in lira, this is what fixes the size of your claim. It also means a delay in paying an invoice moves both the amount and the deadline.

Platform commissions are the exception

App store and platform commissions never leave your account at all. Apple, Google and Steam deduct their cut and transfer you the net amount, so there is no outgoing payment to evidence.

The programme handles this directly. The platform's payout or financial report shows the gross sales and the commission withheld, and the bank record of the net transfer confirms it. Those two together stand in for the usual proof of payment. The store account does have to be in the company's own name, with the product marketed under it.

Fixing it if this is already your situation

If some of your spending is on the wrong card, you are in better shape than you might think, but only from here on.

Change the payment method on every platform account now, before the next billing cycle. Everything paid from the company account from that point qualifies, and anything already paid correctly within the last six months can still go into your first claim. Past spend on a personal card is not recoverable, so the only real cost of fixing this is the time between noticing and acting.

Go through every recurring payment the company makes and check which card is behind it. We usually find problems in ad accounts, cloud providers, app store developer accounts, software subscriptions, domain providers and conference bookings. It takes an afternoon, and no other hour of admin in this programme is worth as much.