Over the years, I got really good and playing what I call the shell game. To slowly pay off a large balance without paying fees, I would transfer it to a new card with 0% apr. Then when that card offer expired, I would get a new card, and on and on.

But it is harder and harder to do that now because it is difficult to find a card that will offer you 0% without a balance transfer fee. So now my credit card is just used for regular purchases.

At one time I thought all credit cards were basically the same. However in dealing with many different cards over the years, one stands out as being the best to use for purchases.

The best card, I’ve decided, is the Discover card. And my reason is not what you’d expect: it’s because of how easy it is to download a year’s worth of transactions.

This is probably an odd reason. But my credit card is used for my business and at the end of the year, I really need to be able to total all my expenses by category for tax purposes.

I first discovered how important this was after changing to Discover from Bank of America. My old card had no way to download the year’s worth of transactions so I had to keep track of everything on a spreadsheet. When I switched to Discover, I was overjoyed to find a link to a Year-End Summary.

The Discover summary let me download every single purchase for the entire year in a format that Excel could read. They even had appropriate categories so that I could sort and total. So it was a snap to total up all my gas purchases, shipping purchases, etc. to put on my Schedule C.

Ok, so maybe my Bank of America card was just being lame but other cards would give me this option. So I switched from Discover to Chase because I thought their cash-back options were better.

After the end of the year I eagerly went online to download all my transactions. It took weeks for this link to appear, unlike Discover which made it available very soon after December 31. And when I tried to get my Chase year-end summary, I found that it was not downloadable transactions like Discover card had. Instead it was a PDF that listed my transactions, but grouped into some very basic categories of automotive, merchandise, and services.

I’m not sure what the Chase people were thinking with the pdf. How exactly am I supposed to import that into Excel so that I can sort and total? What I ended up doing was copying/pasting each transaction. They also had little pictures of pie charts and check boxes.

Now compare this with Discover: their year-end summary is a csv file (comma separated values) of just your transactions, not silly pictures. Their categories are more meaningful. For example, they have a separate category for Gasoline vs. just Automotive (which would be repairs). Instead of just Services, they have Government Services which for me were all USPS shipping charges. And since it is a csv file, I can import it into Excel, sort the transactions any way I like, and total each category.

What took me hours to do with my Chase card took only minutes with Discover.

The Discover card also has a little benefit: when you go into your account, it shows you a visual pie chart so you can see how you spend your money.

So since I pay off my card entirely each month anyway, rates are not important to me. But saving hours at tax time is. For this reason, I’ll always go with Discover from now on.

Earline Mortner has been using offers about credit cards to lessen a balance for years. She also has a website about ladies casual shoes and womens casual shoes.