In an era where digital transactions have become the norm, it's no surprise that B2B customers are looking for ways to pay online. Whether it is for convenience, improved cash flow or streamlined processes, the benefits of online payments are clear.
Businesses that offer this option to their customers not only increase customer satisfaction, but also gain a competitive edge in the market.
The easier you make it to get paid, the more likely it is that your customers will pay on time (if not early). Providing a way to pay online is a small, yet significant, step businesses can take to improve their customer experience.
In today’s world, if I send you an email and don’t give you a way to make a payment conveniently, I am going to join the ever-growing list of vendors in your accounts payable (AP) queue. With everyone vying to get paid on time, AP departments are swamped, and if you aren’t making it easy to get paid, it is likely that you will fall to the bottom of their “to-do” list.
Unfortunately, most accounting departments lack the tools necessary to make online payments happen in a cost-effective way and are still using the antiquated accounting model of yesteryear.
The Manual Approach
Today, many accounting teams rely heavily on manual processes and are paying with paper checks. This means that invoices are being sent via email and then the waiting game begins. Your customer receives the invoice, enters the details into their accounting system. When your invoice arrives, you enter the queue for scheduled payments to go out, sometimes issued once a month.
Once the payment does go out, it too, will go out via paper check (you haven’t provided any other option here). After receiving the check, your AR department manually verifies the amount against the invoice and processes the check. The days of manual bookkeeping are long-gone, and customers expect to be able to pay quickly and securely. Now what if you were able to eliminate one or all of these manual processes?
Leveraging “out of the box” payment technology can be costly for small-to-medium businesses. While most accounting packages allow you to send an email that says, “pay now,” there isn’t a cost-effective way to manage digital payments, as these often carry a substantial subscription fee that can be difficult to manage or carry a general “service fee.”
It isn’t cost effective for 3% (or more) of your profits to be “taken off the top,” as the transaction fee. The alternative is often surcharging, which often carries its own negative experience for your customers and isn’t a viable option for organizations with a global customer-base.
Despite these challenges, digitizing payments is crucial for B2B companies to remain competitive in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
The Self-Service Approach
But how can you stay competitive without paying excessive fees? It is time to explore the benefits of a customer self-service payment portal. A self-service payment portal is an online platform or application that allows users to make payments and manage their financial transactions independently, without the need for direct assistance from a customer service representative or physical interaction with a payment terminal.
A customer payment portal streamlines the payment process for you, making it efficient and stress-free, while minimizing service fees and added costs. By automating payments, businesses can reduce the risk of errors, cut down on processing time, and free up resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.
In today's fast-paced world, time is of the essence. Eliminating paper invoices, manual processes, and checks from your AR workflow creates process efficiencies and digitizes your cash flow. Going digital can revolutionize the way we work and help us manage our time more effectively.
Automation gives us the ability to streamline our processes, reduce human error and eliminate the need for manual input and paperwork. By doing so, we can save time and improve accuracy, allowing us to focus on more important tasks. By providing an easy-to-use customer payment portal, businesses can offer customers a more convenient way to pay and ensure that payments are processed quickly and accurately.
With the right automated payment solutions in place, B2B companies can successfully realize their goal of digitizing their accounting practices while meeting customer expectations and getting paid on time.
Matthew Shanahan is VP of Strategy, Network and Cofounder of Lockstep. Matthew has over 30 years of experience in the software industry and has held senior management positions at Globys, Azuqua, Scout Analytics, Documentum and Accenture.
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