Registering a Business Credit Card on Hometax

The point of a business credit card is not the card. It is that the National Tax Service can collect its transaction data directly from the card company, so that hundreds of purchases arrive at VAT time as filing data rather than as a box of receipts to key in.

How the general and simplified VAT regimes themselves work is a separate question — Korean VAT for small business owners covers that. This guide is only the card data: how it is collected, and how deductible and non-deductible are decided.

Automation does not remove the judgement. It gathers up the transactions that need one.

Where it is, and what it will not take

In Hometax:

Log in → Invoices · Receipts · Cards
       → Credit card purchases
       → Business credit card registration and enquiry

An individual business can register up to 50 cards, and the field on the screen says exactly which: credit cards and check cards in the name of the representative or the company. They do not have to be cards opened specifically for the business — an ordinary personal credit card in the owner’s name can be registered.

A mobile number is required alongside the card numbers. It is not optional politeness: it is where the SMS goes if a card number is mistyped, and clearing all the card numbers clears the phone number with them.

What the scheme will not take:

A card registered this month can be checked for an identity match from around the 10th of next month, and usage history has been available monthly for registrations from October 2019 onward. So if a new card is going to carry business spending, register it before you start using it, not after the first statement.

One card type to keep out deliberately: fuel usage on a freight driver welfare card is queried through its own menu, and the screen asks you not to register it here.

Individual and corporate cards are collected differently

A card issued in a company’s name is already tied to the company, so there is nothing to register.

Which is not the same as “paid on the corporate card, therefore deductible and expensed.” A director’s personal purchases, a family meal, a private trip — the name on the card does not make any of that a business cost. Corporate cards automate collection. They do not decide business relatedness.

The tax office sorts first. You decide last

Registered card data goes from the card company to the National Tax Service, which analyses it against the counterparty’s registration status and industry classification. Hometax then shows each transaction in one of three states:

The confirmation screen for input tax deduction is where you settle those, and settling them is your job, not the system’s. Data that shows up marked deductible is not a ruling. A meal with no business purpose does not become deductible under the Value-Added Tax Act because a classification engine put it in the wrong bucket.

What never deducts, whatever card paid for it

Two of those cost people real money:

Entertainment. A meal with a client, a round of golf — genuinely connected to the business in an ordinary sense, and still treated by the Value-Added Tax Act as its own non-deductible category. The VAT inside entertainment spending does not deduct the way VAT on materials does.

Non-commercial small passenger cars. Using a car for work does not make it deductible. Purchase, lease and running costs including fuel and servicing are, as a rule, outside input tax deduction. Where the vehicle itself is the business — car dealing, vehicle rental — the analysis is different, and that is a narrow exception rather than a general escape.

Costs relating to a VAT-exempt business cannot be set against the output tax of a taxable one either. Where a cost genuinely serves both, common input tax has to be apportioned.

VAT deduction and expense deduction are two different tests

Run them as an ordered sequence rather than one decision:

Card payment
  → is it business related?
  → is the VAT input tax deductible?
  → is the amount an allowable expense for income or corporate tax?

An unregistered card is not a void card

Not registering does not remove the expense from your business. What you lose is automatic collection, which means evidencing each transaction separately — the exact work the scheme exists to remove.

From 2026, validation on the individual electronic VAT return has been tightened: with no registration history, amounts cannot simply be entered into the business card field of the return. Continuing on unregistered cards is not an efficient way to manage tax records.

But the claim that non-registration itself attracts penalty tax is not accurate. The real exposure sits elsewhere: deducting input tax that never qualified, entering the same transaction twice from different card statements, or putting private spending through as deductible. The National Tax Service can assess the input tax back and apply penalty tax on those.

Do not meet the classification for the first time in filing week

The whole point is to remove the receipt-gathering sprint before the deadline. Meeting several hundred pre-classified transactions for the first time on the day you file recreates it.

Check the Hometax record monthly or quarterly, and look hardest at:

The setup that stays clean

Separate the account, the card and the evidence at the same time, right after registering the business:

A company should build the same control around a corporate account and corporate cards. Repeatedly paying company costs on the director’s personal card and reimbursing afterwards makes the evidence trail and the cash flow harder to follow than they need to be.

The value of registering a business card is not that it deducts more tax. It is that it stops you missing deductions you were entitled to, strips out the ones you were never entitled to before you file them, and turns several hundred card payments into something you can actually file from.