Anyone working in any business has probably, at some point, rolled their eyes when they’ve heard someone barking the phrase ‘time is money’. It’s one of those clichés, however, that often turns out to be true. Waste time and you can also end up wasting money, or certainly reducing the opportunities of making more.
Time and money are also similar in that a little bit of either quickly adds up. So, if your accounts receivable team or credit controllers are taking between 5 and 20 minutes to process and allocate payments made by your customers, you don’t have to be a maths whizz to work out that this manual process ravenously eats into your valuable time. Each transaction may on average only take around 10 minutes from the point the payment is taken until it is logged in the system, but consider this, how many card payments do you process on a daily, weekly, monthly or even annual basis and then times those numbers by the average 10 minutes it takes your credit controllers to process and allocate those payments. The outcome?
If you run a busy office or are an SME you’ll know that maximising the limited resource available is a necessity and that any process that can significantly improve efficiency and free up more of your credit controllers time to focus on the reduction of DSO, bad debt provisions and the increase in cash flow is surely worth considering right?
So we know that allocating payments onto the sales ledger or ERP system is a time-consuming task. The arguments in favour of this manual method may state that it adds a useful layer of oversight into the system. That may well be the case, but the advantages of an automated allocation system far outweigh those of the manual equivalent.
For a start, automated allocation systems can actually reduce the risk of human error. Payment data is entered as soon as it is received and the automated process can quickly log it and file it where it needs to go, all at the touch of a button (or click of a mouse).
Businesses are constantly striving for efficiency and reducing time is a major step forward to improving that. However, efficiency isn’t just about doing things quickly, it’s also about completing tasks accurately, and in a way which seamlessly blend into your existing ways of working.
That’s why you should not only consider a payment allocation system that is efficient and delivers a significant cost benefit to your business, but also a system which is truly bespoke and compatible.
Agile Payment Solutions’ Online Payment Portal integrates smoothly with existing ERP systems such as Sage, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and other systems which may be bespoke to the industry in which your business operates. Our systems also integrate with payment gateways such as Sage Pay, Wordplay and Barclays to ensure all payments processed are fully PCI compliant.
So, we’ve ticked off time and compatibility, what other benefits does Agile’s automated cash allocation system and Online Payment Portal deliver? The ability for customers to obtain copy documents directly from the portal such as invoices and proof of deliveries certainly adds to the savings in time, but enabling direct access to such documents in real time also reduces operating costs and offers greater flexibility thus improving the customer experience too.
Furthermore, with the improvements in efficiency there’s no need for the business to worry about taking on additional customers as your Accounts Receivables team will be able to handle greater volumes without getting bogged down in the slow and cumbersome manual allocation process. They can confidently direct payment traffic to the new streamline system and avoid congestion, allowing the cash to flow much more easily.
So, if you are looking to save time and money, don’t waste another second, contact us now to arrange a no obligation of our Online Payment System.
