What is payment automation?
Businesses can make payments to their bills by using electronic payment systems. Payment automation aims to automate, optimize and streamline the previously manual processes relating to payments.
Top 3 manual tasks to automate.
For any business to practically automate their payments, there are three areas that must be considered.
- Invoice data entry
- Invoice approval or matching
- Payment execution
Here are the 7 reasons why you need payment automation for your business growth.
Save on costs and time.
Businesses that perform manual tasks such as printing cheques and collecting approvals incur a lot of costs during the account payable process. Time too is also wasted in the process of executing payments.
Payment automation cuts down overhead costs and saves time that would be wasted by employees doing manual follow-ups on invoices and cheques.
Improves billing accuracy.
This provides clear data on the payment process. It enhances insights such as advanced analytics that show which stage of the cycle takes the longest for payment execution.
It also allows your business to monitor vendors with all their payment due dates. Once the payment has been authorized, the invoice makes its way to the person who will manually execute the online bank payment. This person needs to have clear visibility into all payments. Payment automation creates this clarity for your business.
Improves customer service and experience.
The advancement of technology has also given birth to the demand for fast results. Customers do not want to spend a lot of time executing and double-checking if their payments were received by your business.
Payment automation is much faster and integrates components that provide a 24/7 convenience experience for your customers.
Enhances security and fraud prevention.
The AFP payments fraud and control survey in 2019 reported that 81% of companies were victims of fake invoices. The frequency of this explains the importance of securing your sensitive data. That is why you need payment automation for your business.
Fraudsters and those attempting to commit fraud can be easily noticed through the inconsistencies of an automated system.
Reduces errors and duplicated payments.
Duplicated payments and wasted time are the results of AP errors. The percentage of duplicates and over-payments can be reduced by businesses by leveraging automation.
Payment automation can significantly reduce the capacity of human error and accelerate complex calculations that tend to be tedious and time-consuming for human accounts.
Facilitates remote work environments.
Business growth is catalyzed by the working environment of your employees. Today’s work environment includes a mix of remote and in-office employees.
It is true that Covid-19 was a huge catalyst to digitize the financial functions of many businesses. At the peak of the pandemic, the number of full-time employees shrunk from 85%-63%.
Many businesses that stabilized their growth adapted payment automation to support remote work environments and to retain financial professionals for business expansion.
Compliance monitoring and increased process control.
Most regulatory bodies and authorities have upgraded compliance standards across various sectors which have become a challenge to many businesses that face issues like misplaced payment documents due to manual processes. Archiving data manually is tedious and time-consuming.
Payment automation helps in business growth by consolidating all compliance data in one system to avoid delays and penalties from regulatory authorities.
In conclusion, all modern businesses rely on IoT(Internet of Things) devices to get things done quickly. Payment automation isn’t just a process, it is a complete system.
By choosing payment automation, your business growth will be enhanced by better customer experience, faster payment processing and reduced costs in the long run. Payment automation helps businesses focus on customers; which is always a good thing.