If your business sells products, it’s important to not only make the products high quality, but the process of buying them too – especially online. The process should be effortless for your customers and employees – creating the most efficient business possible.
So, if you want to make your business run more smoothly, here are five ways to simplify the payment process with an advanced spend management software – such as that provided by Mesh Payments.
Accept different payment forms
One way to ensure a business is worth revisiting, is to make payments an easy process. Accepting a wide range of payment options will increase the number of sales your business has, as more customers are being catered for. Customers will become satisfied in knowing that they have freedom when it comes to choosing how to pay.
Not only is this great for customers, but for business payments. Ensuring that payment types are more flexible could result in stronger relationships between a business and its suppliers.
The first type of payment that your business should accept are credit or debit cards, as these are the most common choices.
With more people going contactless, mobile pay has grown significantly, so this is another vital option that your business should accept – a great example of this is Apple Pay.
Spend management includes additional options with Plug & Pay™ cards and virtual cards to give more flexibility. With more payment options potentially being a win for all, this is a great step to ensure relationships between everyone involved in a business are strong.
Determine what your business needs
Allowing for more payment options could become expensive, especially if your business is smaller, so it’s important to evaluate what your business needs. The type of payment processor will depend on what a business can afford, so this should be properly considered.
Some considerations are based on business size and a business’ average sales volume, but also the processing fees that are involved.
There’s an in-house processing fee where Point of Sale (POS) systems can charge a business a monthly usage, or a credit card processing fee, instead of a monthly fee.
Data organization
When you begin to think of adding a wider variety of payment options to your business, there will be a higher need to keep all of the data surrounding them organized. Without great levels of organization, this could cause system complications, resulting in a weak workflow.
Something to look into when processing data is analytics reporting, which assists a business in converting information into insights. This can be used to efficiently check sales reports and create schedules for business payments.
Without reporting the payments a business is making and receiving, a company could fail. By setting out your line of organization, it will become easier to implement this across all business areas to keep them in order. With spend management, a business can manage their whole spend from a centralized hub, with full control into every payment – in real time.
Ensure privacy and security
When customers are making payments to your business, or your business is making outgoing payments, it’s important that online payments are fast, smooth, but most importantly – personal data is safe.
Online payments are extremely open to scams, but there are safety measures that can prevent them from happening. By getting a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate for your business, it provides a sense of security to anyone using its services.
Automatic payments
A great way to become efficient within a business is to set up automatic payments. These could be used for payments to regular suppliers through automation software. The same goes for customers, as they can set up monthly subscription fees, making it easier for all to use.
Spend management helps with automation by seamlessly integrating with your businesses ERP (enterprise resource planning) to automate the whole payment process and streamlining workflows with any apps that are already in use.
With simplicity across all kinds of payments, this is a great way to boost sales and business transactions with suppliers.
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With five steps to improve the payment process within a business, using just one will make a business more efficient.
