How to Automate Your Business Payments Efficiently

Thoughts from the CEO

One of the prime drivers of your company’s existence is money. Revenue generation is your goal, and payments in and out are an important part of your daily proceedings. Client payments can involve thousands of transactions per year, draining your time and causing frustration when things fail to run smoothly.

In the modern world of business, there are fewer valid excuses as to why this should be the case. Advanced technologies and tools have increased the efficiency of available payment methods; automation is the key to making your life much easier in this regard.

Payment automation solutions have many benefits. Read on to explore some solutions and learn how to automate your payment solutions efficiently.

Why bother with payment automation?

Business owners should always strive to make things more efficient. Be it saving time and money in your email marketing with Klaviyo alternatives or discovering automated payment methods to reduce the cost of invoicing, improving efficiency benefits your company.

When it comes to payments, paper invoices and other antiquated conventional banking methods take longer and are more expensive. Digitizing your payment system is the best way to reduce invoicing costs via application programming interfaces (APIs) that significantly trim the manual processing requirements of transactions, freeing you and your staff to spend time elsewhere.

From reconciling financial statistics to collecting and writing cheques and invoices, the ever-increasing financial needs of your business will be easier met without the hassle of manual processing. And let’s not even get started on the human errors that payment automation can avoid…

How to automate your business payments 

Just as with any online sector, financial and banking institutions are trying to make their mark. One way customer engagement in banking is raised is by making life easier for consumers. As a result, we’ve seen a boost in the capabilities of automated payment methods.

Automation requires a little effort to set up, but investing your time in automation will result in smoother and faster processes. A one-time investment in payment automation provides great ROI; here are some specific ways to automate your payments moving forward.

#1: e-Invoicing

Invoices are the gateway to your financial transactions, and manual invoicing is not conducive to automation. As invoicing is a significant part of the financial workflow, digitalizing them is a must. However, there is no universal standard for this, so a level of collaboration with your vendors and clients is required. There are countless automation solutions available to process electronic invoices. This automation offers a range of benefits, such as reducing paper costs and allowing for automatic payment reminders.

#2: Payment approval automation

Approving payments is another important step and very common when dealing with B2B payments. Approval allows the transaction to proceed. Therefore, automating payment approval and verification speeds the process up and avoids any possible issues with unauthorized approval.

Approval automation can route every invoice to the relevant department, saving time and creating simple availability of data and access to the relevant invoices, ensuring requests are handled swiftly.

#3: Automatic verification and matching

Manually sending and verifying invoices and cheques means approving and verifying each address, which is time-consuming and leaves plenty of room for error. The manual verification process also makes it harder to handle situations like a change of or invalid mailing address.

Automation solutions streamline the writing and printing process while validating mailing addresses for you. An automated address validation option will usually access address databases from various official resources. The entered mailing address will be matched against these databases to ensure you are indeed sending to a real (and correct) address.

#4: Integrating API in the manual process

Automation goes beyond digital solutions to make conventional methods perform better. If you need to maintain a level of manual work in your process for whatever reason, process optimization can help. For example, cheque APIs allow you to write, print, and mail cheques online. 

As we’ve all experienced, relying on banking institutions can be tedious and expensive when dealing with cheque processing times and fees. Generate your own personalized cheques that are completely legal with APIs that you can integrate with your existing infrastructure. Cheques with your company branding? No problem.

There is a strong argument that any use of cheques is pointless when you consider the financial technology available today. However, at least for the short term, cheques still have a place in the financial sector. They are still a commonly used payment method, and you can’t get rid of them entirely. Step into the modern age a little by using APIs to automate the writing and mailing process to increase efficiency.

#5: Reviewing a transaction status

Reviewing and monitoring payments is important for balancing the books, making this task another manual process that is time-consuming and open to error. With AI-based automation solutions, monitoring all payments, filtering those that have been paid, and reviewing any still pending can be much easier. 

With secure payment gateways, you can also see insights and historical data that can help identify which clients are paying on time and which aren’t paying at all. With this handy financial data, you can analyze and optimize your process to improve it further.

Make your life easier with automation

Payment automation provides maximum control over your finance and revenues thanks to visibility and transparency. The level of scalability available via various automated solutions will undoubtedly save you time and money, paving the way for business growth. Streamline payments with automation today and as always, check out some of the other helpful articles at corecommerce to create better business processes.