Why place payment at the center of your financial strategy?
In a world where every company strives to maximize its operational efficiency and profitability, payment is a central component of its financial strategy. From supplier/customer relationships to cash flow optimization and risk management, payment directly impacts the company’s financial health and therefore deserves special attention.
Each payment, whether incoming or outgoing, is naturally coupled with a multitude of data, which is not limited to the transaction amount, but includes a lot of information, on commercial and administrative partners, on their habits or processes for example.
By integrating payment services into its management tool, a company is able to read, analyze and use this data in order to optimize its financial decision-making, and more broadly, its operations.
Bill payment: why integrate it into your financial software ?
Between commercial, organizational and financial advantages, integrating invoice payment into your business software ensures performance and growth of your activity.
Reduce your Order-to-Cash
Many payment services can be integrated into financial management tools to optimize the sending of payment requests, facilitate their collection and processing. For example, from the time of publication, the accounting department can integrate a matched payment link into the invoice, allowing the finance team to track its status in real time, schedule reminders and identify the issuers of payments received, across all channels and payment methods.
These invoice payment facilities, directly integrated into the software, offer several advantages for financiers, including an increase in the volume of customer collections and a reduction in payment times.
Optimize and unify all its internal financial processes
Today, many companies are implementing a collective financial strategy, where all departments are involved in the continuous optimization of cash flow and profitability: the cash culture. This mentality is made possible in particular by the centralization and unification of all financial data within a single tool.
With this in mind, integrating invoice payment into internal tools offers two main advantages to accounting departments :
- Clear visualization of all financial transactions : They can easily access payment history (pending or completed), monitor cash flow in real time, identify anomalies, perform exports and statistical analyses, etc., in order to proactively monitor cash flow, anticipate needs and limit all risks.
- Many automation possibilities : With all the payment data collected, they can identify and implement processes, based on scenarios aimed at automating certain repetitive or time-consuming tasks (customer reminders, accounting reconciliation, generic customer communication, etc.). This frees up time for more strategic and value-added tasks, while limiting the risk of human error.
Improve your customer experience and relationship
Finally, with a payment block integrated into its financial tool, a company can quickly and simply send invoice payment requests to its customers via several channels (email, SMS, etc.) and can be paid using different methods (bank card, SEPA transfer, etc.), conditions (on order, in installments, etc.) and payment facilities (split, wallets, etc.).
Additionally, these payment services often integrate the ability to automate customer communication related to invoice payments, in order to keep them informed of potential events concerning them (payment success or failure, scheduled retry, etc.). A simple and frictionless payment experience greatly contributes to overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.
¹ Yooz, The dematerialization of invoices (2022)