Digital Tools for Collecting Payments

Most businesses receive money in a variety of different ways with bank transfers and direct debits offering simple online solutions in place of cash, cheques, and BACS.

Cash, cheques, and BACS can be slow as they require manual intervention, and it's easy to put these to one side when faced with making a payment. This leads to cash collections being slower than necessary which can have a negative effect on cash flow. So what can be done to speed this up and reduce the amount of time it takes to get paid?

This blog is intended to provide further insight into how cloud technology can be used to get paid quicker.
Let's start by looking at the typical pain points that a business may encounter in this area:

1. Loss of sales due to not having or offering adequate or up-to-date payment services to modern-day customers
2. Slow payments and high debtors days, with customers frequently paying beyond their payment terms
3. Debtor's days may not be known or monitored
4. Too much time spent chasing sales invoices and slow payers, and too many false promises from customers
   Lack of predictability of when sales invoices will be paid

Our Recommendations

• Sending invoices directly from accounting software will not only speed up the issuing of the invoices but will also give a digital audit trail to show when customers have opened their invoices - there are no excuses
• For regular or recurring invoices, attach a direct debit service that will allow you to take funds at an agreed date with direct debits automatically updated if the amount changes
• For one-off invoices, attach a payment link to ensure customers pay you there and then
• Use recurring invoice features within the accounting software which will raise invoices on a specific date, which can then automatically be sent, avoiding unnecessary bottlenecks
• Consider implementing an automated credit control service that will take away the pain of manually chasing individual customers, or some of the pain at least

Selecting the right tool

Selecting the right tool is not something that should be done lightly. The right tool must deal with your pain points, but also any future goals you may have. For example, you may have a desire to set up an online shop or integrate other sales channels.

In any case, we recommend taking the following steps:

1. Establish your pain points - what is causing you headaches, what are your bugbears?
2. Set out your business goals - do you have plans to grow?
3. Review your current data flow - this also helps establish areas of improvement
4. Obtain recommendations

As part of our App Advisory service we will :

1. Undertake your initial scope with you (points 1 - 4 above)
2. Evaluate the tools that best fit your requirements and provide our recommendation
3. Implement your chosen tool
4. Provide training to your team
5. Provide ongoing support

We also have a wide network of consultants in the digital arena, so if we are unable to help, rest assured we know someone who can.