Managing your payments efficiently is vital for ensuring your finances are healthy and that your business is performing.
But payment process inefficiencies still plague most businesses, emphasizing the need for solutions that optimize how businesses handle their payments.
One solution many have turned to is all-in-one payment management systems that offer the features and capabilities to streamline payment processing, providing numerous benefits for businesses. Below, we explore these benefits and why it’s worth adopting a payment management system to streamline your own payment processing.
What is a Payment Management System and Why Do You Need it?
SaaS businesses especially have more sophisticated payment needs than other merchants, and to match the ease and efficiency of your SaaS business’ offering, your payments need to be just as easy and efficient for customers. A reliable, well-integrated payment process that’s safe and easy-to-use is essential for remaining competitive in an increasingly digital marketplace, where innovative services and products are quickly becoming the norm. A streamlined payment experience is the cherry on top of a good SaaS offering, and this is achieved through a payment management system.
A payment management system is a platform that enables and optimizes your business’ monetary transactions, including income and expenditures. Usually cloud-based, an efficient payment management system integrates with your accounting system and allows you to process multiple types of payment, and manage payments received and made, in a way that reduces costs and streamlines payment processing.
The right payment management system can simplify your business operations, increase profits, reduce payment errors, and help retain and grow your customer base. Below, we outline six benefits that come with adopting a good payment management system.
Speed up the payment process
Because payment management systems aggregate every aspect of your finances into a single, comprehensive platform, they inherently make processing payments more efficient. For both income and expenditure considerations, payment management systems have the capabilities to automate and streamline much of the payment approval process, ensuring your funds are received quicker while helping you stay on top of regular expenses like inventory purchases and overhead payments.
Accept foreign currency payments
In this day and age where products can be purchased from anywhere in the world, consumers expect to be able to make cross-border payments easily when purchasing goods. As such, businesses need payment systems that support foreign currency payments, especially SaaS businesses with a global client base. Being able to accept multiple different currencies, or automatically convert currencies during the payment process, is a must for your business as, without it, you limit the growth of your customer base. A good payment management system should support foreign currency payments with ease, and even allow customers to see what they’re paying, in their local currency, helping to avoid possible future payment disputes.
Support multiple payment options
Payment management systems allow businesses to accept payments in many different forms, including by credit card, online payments, cash, POS or with digital wallets like Google Pay or Apple Pay. This is integral to payment success – and therefore business growth – as consumers also expect to be able to make payments via their preferred payment methods. So, by accepting various forms of payment, you can be sure of improved customer satisfaction and even grow your customer base further.
Ensure better risk protection
Accepting any type of digital payment does invite the risk of fraud, but most payment management systems can help mitigate this and other risks with built-in security measures that can, for example, detect instances of fraud and automatically recover funds in the event of a fraudulent transaction. Additional payment security features your payment management system should have include encryption and tokenization, and it should also be PCI-DSS compliant for credit and debit card processing. As modern SaaS solutions come with sophisticated data security measures as is, it’s important that your payment process is just as secure as your offering itself.
Lower operating costs
Having all of your payment information and processes in one place can greatly reduce operational inefficiencies, and even let you allocate resources and staff to other, more value-adding priorities. Because payment management systems are designed to handle your entire accounts payable workflow, individual, batch, and recurring payments, approvals and authorizations, and vendor validations are all automated, meaning wasteful time spending can be eliminated and disparate processes and departments can be integrated for greater efficiency and less resource usage.
Keep record of transactions
Tracking and recording transactions are important for reporting purposes, data insights and tax obligations. But accurate and complete transaction records are also necessary for resolving payment disputes or discrepancies that would otherwise cost your business. With a payment management system, keeping record of transactions becomes more efficient, as you can store transaction records in a way that cash payments, for example, can’t. This way, you know your payment transactions are tracked and recorded in full, and all information pertaining to a transaction can be easily accessed.
The Challenges of Having an Inefficient Process
Inefficient payment management processes pose a number of challenges to businesses, over and above incurring unnecessary costs. For starters, these processes, which are usually manual and siloed, are complex and difficult to follow perfectly, which can lead to gaps in information, missed payments, incomplete data and records and all-around frustration for your operations team.
Additionally, these processes compromise a business’ payment flexibility, not only in terms of the payment methods it offers customers but also in terms of the payment systems it uses. With inflexible payment processes, businesses have less agility to adapt systems like payment gateways as required, and are as such limited to the payment tools they have, despite how inefficient these may be. In the SaaS world where agility is a key business practice that helps ensure an optimal service offering, sluggish payment processing simply doesn’t align with how SaaS businesses operate.
These processes and systems also result in a lack of data visibility, which can impact important business decisions. Engagement, conversion and retention metrics are all actionable data insights that help businesses identify what is and isn’t working in their processes, so being able to achieve full data visibility for comprehensive data insights is integral to ensuring overall business performance and customer satisfaction. But if your teams are bogged down with searching for incomplete data across disparate systems and processes, or trying to normalize data for analytics, then they won’t have time or capacity to make meaningful sense of the data.
The Power of an All-in-One Payment Management System
An effective all-in-one payment management system can help you combat the above process inefficiencies and streamline your payment processing considerably, leading to better workflows, more productive teams and reduced resource wastage.
Here are three key ways a payment management system can streamline your payment processes.
Access your data in one place
Payment management systems support easy integrations that pull relevant financial data from multiple systems into a single data source. Traditionally, invoices, transaction records and payment tracking have all been managed in separate tools, but with the capabilities of an all-in-one payment management system, data is compiled into a single dashboard, providing full payment process visibility without the need to switch between systems. This streamlines payment processes and allows you to make informed decisions leveraging complete data insights.
Optimize your payment processing
As an integral part of securing income and facilitating necessary business expenditures, payments are a vital component of business success. But without a streamlined payment process, you put your entire business’ finances at risk. You need to keep on top of your payments and payment records to ensure money isn’t wasted, payments aren’t missed and payment disputes are handled with minimal impact on your business. To do this, you need to leverage the functionality of a payment management system to optimize your payment processing and minimize the risk of human error that comes with inefficient, manual processes.
Build custom reports
Reporting helps track business performance and highlights possible issues that need addressing. Thanks to the increased data visibility payment management systems provide, reporting becomes much more streamlined. With all your clear data insights easily accessible in one place, you can build out custom, detailed reports on payments, invoices, deposits, inventory etc. that are as in-depth or high-level as you need them to be, and easily export them in just a few clicks.
Summary
Ensuring your payment process enables your SaaS business’ finances, rather than hinders it, means tapping into the uses of technology to optimize your entire payment cycle. From generating invoices to tracking expenditures to reporting on payments, an effective payment management system can streamline your payment processing and help your business and teams save valuable time and money, and focus more on keeping your innovative service offering great.
To modernize your payment processes and increase their efficiency, it’s worth adopting an all-in-one payment management system that integrates with other key systems like your accounting software, and leveraging it to start making your payment processing more efficient.
Streamline your Payment Processes with Cardchamp
At CardChamp, we provide the very best payment acceptance experience to the world’s greatest businesses. As business owners ourselves, we’re on your business’ side, and we provide innovative technology, transparent pricing and tailored payment processing solutions that help your business win.
Our proprietary payment gateway offers dynamic features and robust APIs that help you gain more control over your payments. We support full invoice management and bundle processing and use tokenization technology and security. Our solutions also fully integrate with QuickBooks, letting you run transactions and avoid manual data entry - all from within QuickBooks.
Would you like to learn more about how to choose a payment gateway for your SaaS business? Find out more about how we’re streamlining payment processing for businesses, here.
