Corporate Cards and Auxiliary Business Services — Overview

New companies can get corporate credit and debit cards from freee, SBI, GMO Aozora, Amex, and Up-sider, each with different terms. Separately covered here are problems with long names in Japanese forms, ERP systems such as Odoo, freelance marketplaces, and My Number Card readers. Corporate credit and debit cards: freee card (freee.co.jp/card/); SBI, which issues a corporate card immediately when the account opens, with a limit that can start around 100,000 yen and grow to 1 million yen with use; GMO Aozora (debit); Amex (credit, generally no particular trouble even for a new company); and Up-sider/Upsider (up-sider.com, upsidercap.com), a debit card for small and medium businesses with an individually set rate and a limit up to 1 billion yen, which integrates with freee (syncing individual card transactions, not just the final charge), automatically recognizes receipts (領収書) and books them for tax purposes, and prepares tax-office documents; it pays 1% cashback monthly on the 1st. For bulk purchases on behalf of the company, using personal cards is not considered safe. A recurring problem with long surnames/first names in Japanese forms is that the system can silently truncate or wrap part of the surname into the "first name" field — a real case involved a PayPay credit card that became unusable because of an operator error during registration. An Amazon-sold My Number Card reader is needed to read the physical My Number chip (not via NFC) for e-Tax/eLTAX; these are sold on Amazon, at Yodobashi and Bic Camera, and secondhand on Mercari. Odoo (odoo.com) is an all-in-one business platform (CRM, e-signatures, ERP); the first app is free, additional ones cost $20/user/month; how well it integrates with Japanese accounting/reporting requirements is unclear (unverified). Among freelance marketplaces, Lancers takes a 16.5% commission on an order (effectively about 22% once the markup to the client is included); an alternative with a lower cut is Socious (socious.io/ja). Source: https://www.freee.co.jp/card/ — Official page of the freee card corporate card. Source: https://up-sider.com/ — Up-sider corporate debit card service for small and medium businesses. Source: https://www.odoo.com — Official site of the Odoo ERP/CRM platform. Source: https://socious.io/ja — Socious freelance marketplace, an alternative to Lancers with lower commission.