Electronic Invoicing and Payments Are Here and Now
In business, cash flow is king. Yes, profitability is important, but having actual cash on hand gives a business owner leverage. Having your profits tied up in receivables does not.
A simple cash and carry store doesn’t have this problem, but most other businesses do.
A simple way to improve cash flow is to reduce the latency between providing a product or service and receiving the cleared funds for providing such.
So, it begs the question, why rely on snail mail to carry your invoices to your customers, and then wait for snail mail to also bring your payment check back to you?
The old model of paper based invoicing has far too many labor steps and requires paper to travel from your company to your customer’s and back again. And, your customer also has a number of labor steps along the way.
There's printing, signing, stamping, sitting in a mailbox until the postal worker picks it up, etc. etc. It could take up to 45 days from completing a service or shipping a product to actually having cleared funds in your bank.
Electronic Invoicing - A New Model
Today, we live in a digitized world. Our music and our photos are all digitized for rapid delivery, so why not our invoicing and payment systems? Well, as of today, it is.
You can now generate an electronic invoice in a PDF and immediately email it to your customer and they can pay you immediately, if necessary, and securely via a credit card.
Some of our merchants have a policy against storing customers' credit card info, they just don't want to bear the risk. Consequently they insist on phone-in payments for credit cards. But, that may not be convenient for certain customers to call during office hours.
Electronic invoice payments are 100% secure. When the customer receives an invoice, they also receive a link to a special server over the Internet by which to pay their invoice. The server is fully encrypted and fully PCI compliant. The funds get deposited into the merchant's bank account usually the next business day. The merchants' existing fee structure applies.
So, customers can pay the electronic invoice anytime day, night, or weekend and not have to bother phoning in their credit card info.
A Win / Win Solution
Imagine your customers paying your invoices at a time convenient to them, even from their mobile device. As for you, the merchant, your receivables have just shrunk to a manageable level, and you never have to hear the words, “Oh, the checks in the mail”.
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