We put a deposit on Visa and then paid the balance on visa approx 2 weeks later. It is an option to pay the whole amount upfront. We made sure we paid the visa off when it was due.
You can set up payments on a credit card. That's what we did when we bought in 2004. We had the payments come off our master card (so we got points on the m/c for it) then made lump payments every few months (also on m/c) until it was gone!
Our first points were deposited into our account in June of last year and we didn't finish paying it off until this January. But yes we could have used them as soon as they were in our account.