Ask any finance department about their worst nightmare; they’ll say it’s bill payment and processing. This is a running theme because bill processing is a time-consuming, tiring, and lengthy task. Especially for growing businesses, this task becomes more and more insurmountable by the passing day. Repetitive errors in bill processing are inevitable and often end up costing businesses unsalvageable losses as their accounting departments continue to work late hours to sort their invoices manually.
Fortunately, as the business industry is technologically evolving for the better, this cumbersome process has an easy and efficient solution. Bill payment and processing automation can entirely transform a business’s financial management by shifting everything to an auto-pilot mode. Accounting firms offer bill payment automation support in the shape of advanced software and digital platforms to expedite a business’s payment process and provide an improved customer experience.
As recorded in an automation study recently, not only do bill pay automation solutions quicken the payment process, but also cut the processing costs by 50% and boost payment collection time by 62%. By making bill payments easier for AR teams and finance departments, these automation systems become more of a necessity than just competitive tools for businesses. It’s important for business owners to learn further about bill payment automation and how it boosts their payment processes to streamline their financial management
10 Ways How Bill Pay Automation Streamlines a Business’s Financial Operations
Bill payment automation isn’t just there to help businesses save time and money, but also to technologically upscale their operations to help them keep up with their competitors. Here are 10 ways how bill payment automation can boost your business’s financial operations:
1. Reduces Processing Time and Cost
Printing out checks and collecting approvals manually is already quite a cost-incurring task on its own. Add the number of days wasted in executing payments and your account payable process becomes one of the most time and cost-consuming business operations. Shifting your bill payment to automated solutions drastically cuts down overhead costs and boosts time efficiency.
2. Enhances Billing Accuracy
Bill payment automation provides clear and detailed data on the payment process. This feature helps gain insights into advanced payment processing analytics, showing the exact stage of the cycle that takes the longest for payment execution. Bill payment automation also allows for more diligent vendor monitoring to ensure every payment is billed accurately and completed on time.
3. Lowers Error Margin and Duplicated Payments
Duplicated payments or inaccurate payments can result in a lot of wasted time and money. Businesses can use automation to reduce the frequency of duplicate and inaccurate payments. Payment automation solutions are designed to oversee task allocation, monitor progress, and identify bottlenecks, which can significantly reduce the margin for human error and expedite complex calculations.
4. Reduces Day’s Sales Outstanding (DSO)
It’s every finance team’s primary goal to lower their day’s sales outstanding (DSO). However, that’s easier said than done if all you have is manual power to chase down delinquent accounts. Combining your sales data and your automated payment solution accelerates the collection process. Payment automation also provides invaluable sales data reports which can help you narrow down high-risk accounts and improve your overall cash flow.
5. Improves Security and Fraud Prevention
Fake invoices might be something you’re familiar with as a business owner. The frequency of the fraud margin you might’ve experienced can demonstrate the necessity of safeguarding your financial data. A payment automation system easily detects any inconsistencies that might be made by someone trying to commit fraud, helping you identify the problem from the start and saving a lot of money.
6. Makes Data Centralized
Payment processing can be tedious if your team is juggling five different applications to manage your financial data. This can also result in incomplete, inaccurate, or missing data that can damage your cash flow. By employing an automated payment system, you no longer have to purchase various bill-processing applications. Your data becomes centralized on an advanced dashboard that manages all your payments and provides important data insights such as customer value or recurring revenue for easy reporting.
7. Boosts Customer Service and Experience
As technology progresses, customer service expectations keep evolving with it and the demand for fast results is now the norm for businesses to provide. You wouldn’t want your customers to spend a lot of time executing payments and checking whether they were received by your business or not. By integrating payment automation, you boost your customer service capacity by allowing your customers to make fast, easy, and trackable payments.
8. Accommodates Remote Work
The working environment of your employees plays a big part in catalyzing your business’s success. You might’ve shifted some of your operations to a remote working environment to sustain your business recently and might want to stabilize your bill payment processing. Shifting to automated bill payment solutions can help you support your remote work environment and retain financial professionals for continued business growth.
9. Offers Diverse Payment Options
One of many ways businesses tend to bring down their sales is by only offering a singular payment option to their customers. Your customers want to buy from a business that’s willing to accommodate them. Offering multiple payment options is a great way to boost your customer service and reduce any delayed payments. By accepting electronic payments, including ACH payments, you open further room for business with your customers and increase your retention rates.
10. Increased Process Control and Compliance
Keeping up with the compliance standards that are often updated regularly can be a headache for your finance department. Not only can it be inconvenient, but manually archiving data or going through previous reports can take a lot of time to get your figures correct. Integrating a payment automation system helps businesses collect compliance data in one place to avoid delays or fines from compliance and regulatory authorities.
Are Bill Payment Digitization and Automation the Same?
Despite being used interchangeably, bill payment digitization and automation are different things. The process of transferring data from a hard copy to a digital format is called digitization. Accounting departments often transfer financial data manually between spreadsheets and various systems. This improves data accessibility and organization. Digitization can be performed automatically through computers, such as by transferring specific data to another system and daily synchronizing it. However, this still leaves room for errors and further manual diligence.
Automation, on the other hand, takes things to the next level by improving existing processes by using advanced software. All process completion and data management tasks are shifted to a machine system, which removes the requirement for manual intervention. By completely automating your bill payment, you’re transferring all manual tasks involved in the process to advanced software that ensures every task is error-free, completed on time, accessible, and updated regularly.
Transform Your Business’s Financial Management With Expert Bill Pay Support
Automating tasks like bill payment and management has become a requirement for all modern businesses. It has developed further than just being a process and branched out into an entire system with multiple features to make bill payment and recovery more efficient.
By automating your bill processing, you can boost your business’s growth by improving customer experience, accelerating payment processing, and improving your cash flow. AccountiPro offers some of the best bill pay automation and AR support services in the industry to help businesses streamline their financial management to promote their success in the long run.