Electronic payments on the rise in North America

Contributor: Matthew Dragiff

Many corporations are taking a second look at their payments strategies as they look to reduce costs and improve the quality of their operations. A prime way companies can accomplish these goals is by doing away with paper checks and the inefficiencies that surround them and instead adopting an electronic payments strategy.

Despite the recent innovations in corporate payments, it is shocking that so many organizations still utilize manual processes when receiving payments from their customers. Many continue to receive paper check disbursements, often leaving accounts receivable departments responsible for matching payments to invoices by hand, and then proceeding to manually enter these payments and remittance data into their corporate accounting systems. Such time-intensive and inefficient processes increase costs related to staffing, printing and postage supplies, as well as lead to discrepancies in customer balances.

It is for these reasons that electronic payments are gaining in popularity among corporations in North America. However, one of the largest obstacles that corporations encounter when migrating to ACH or card payments is how best to invite their vendors to participate in their new payments program.

In a recent poll taken during an electronic payments webcast presented by IAPP, PayStream Advisors and SunGard, 48% of respondents indicated that their primary obstacle preventing migration to ACH and card payments was an inability to get vendors to accept electronic payments. Since it would be far too time-consuming for companies to invite each of their vendors one-by-one to participate in electronic payments, a more efficient approach is to leverage a payments platform that already has a built-in vendor enrollment program.

How does your company currently handle payments processing? If manually, do you ever waste your resources on rectifying misapplied payments? Also, have you considered how much money per month you are spending on check supplies, such as printers, toner, paper and staffing resources to support these manual functions? You may be interested in viewing this ROI calculator that can give you an idea of how much money your company could save per month, as well as how your ecological footprint can be improved by switching over to electronic payments.

Click here to learn more about the many benefits of switching to electronic payments, and get information on how your company can turn its A/P cost center into a revenue generator through the use of virtual card rebate programs.

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