• Automating your payment process can help scale, speed up collections, and reduce over 70% of the repetitive tasks taking up staff’s time and resources
• With a combination of real-time data analysis, faster payment processing, and a reduction in admin busywork, the best-integrated payment solutions offer a path to business growth

From marketing to mergers, there are numerous routes to business growth. But the ability to ease payments shouldn’t be overlooked. Convenient payment solutions encourage a positive cash flow, with the right integration in place. We have automated sales, supply chains, factory assembly lines, and even last-mile delivery. However, many companies have been lax in automating financial processes like billing.

For starters, digital payments automation reduces the cost to process an invoice by half, and speeds up the average time to collect payments by 62%. Digging into the data yields even more compelling numbers for businesses: a study by The Street found that paper invoices are expensive to process because they can’t be fully automated. Since they have to be handled manually, it takes an average of six days to process at a cost of US$16 to US$22 per invoice.

Even with a myriad of accounting tools available, finance teams still spend a bulk of their time manually processing transactions, sending payments, collecting paper checks, reconciling financial data from different sources, and matching an ever-increasing volume of transactions. This process is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone, tying up top talent and developing bottlenecks in the close process.

Why use payment automation for your business?

The data doesn’t lie: payment automation can help businesses realize increased ROI and overall growth. In short, the more automated and efficient a process is, the faster that payments will be collected and that suppliers will get paid. This also means cost savings from faster invoice processing and capturing more early payment discounts. 

Secondly, digital payments are far cheaper and easier to collect than paper checks. Recent research from Ardent Partners shows that automation can contribute to cost reductions of up to 80% when compared with manual and/or paper-based methods. When it comes to errors in the payment process, manual payment solutions eat up valuable time, damage customer and supplier relationships, and can result in duplicate payments. Having reliable payment automation software that validates data entry and identifies exceptions can help you continuously improve, ultimately leaving the competition behind.

Besides that, having an automated system to limit users to authorized functions, while simultaneously ensuring invalid invoices or payments get flagged and reported, is crucial for anyone who aims to pull ahead of the competition. Additionally, by moving to automated digital payments, one can capture more data to support advanced payment analytics and improve reconciliation. Payment automation is becoming a strategic focus area to help finance executives better manage and forecast their cash flow.

Of course, using a comprehensive payment platform helps you avoid investing in multiple applications. Lastly, automated payment solutions offer businesses the ability to self-service with real-time visibility into transaction statuses via a digital portal, which reduces time spent on fielding inquiries and improving relations with suppliers.

In conclusion, according to PayStand, automating the payment process can scale and save the company money, speed up collections, and reduce over 70% of the repetitive tasks taking up staff time and resources. While manual payment processes may work when a company is relatively small and the work is easy for the team to handle, in time, these back-en account operations fail to keep up with their growth and volume.