When it comes to paying bills electronically, seventy-five percent of today’s home – based services don’t provide an efficient or user – friendly experience to their customers. One of the primary reasons is that they are using outdated technology; another is their lack of awareness about the ease and efficiency electronic billing services could bring to their businesses. The common misconceptions for many is that it would take a lot of work to install, use and maintain these systems or that it simply would cost too much. These beliefs are as outdated as their technology and are, in fact, hurting them by creating a long DSO cycle (days sales outstanding) and even a paralysis of their growth.
Today’s electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) systems are state-of-the-art and the most efficient way to run businesses oriented to consumers. Examples of the businesses that can most benefit from EBPP include the waste hauler that picks up trash from your residence, bottled water delivery services, pest extermination companies, and your lawn maintenance guy. With the powerful features that come with EBPP systems, these companies will experience accelerated cash flow, reduced invoicing costs, automated payment tracking capacity and an improvement in customer communications.
CTP Solutions, a nationally-based Business Process Optimization company, slashes administrative overhead by helping companies electronically deliver invoices and statements. By adopting this process, paper billing systems that are outdated and expensive to operate, can be minimized or eliminated completely while also reducing the DSO and other, sky-rocking financial expenses.
Consider this scenario: With an EBPP e-services offering, invoicing is completely automated with notification of billing instantly sent via mobile phone, text messaging or tablet alerts to customers. There’s no need to process or print invoices and certainly no need to pay for postage. Customers can make payments online and if there’s any question, both the customer and business can easily refer to a digital and electronic archive of the payment history, which is more efficient and timely. The digital bills can be created to replicate a company’s paper bills and for added security, the payments received are protected by the privacy, security and confidentiality factors that are built-in to today’s EBPP state-of-the-art technology.
Overall, the benefits of using EBPP systems are multifold – for both the business and the customer. The business benefits from an accelerated cash flow, reduced invoicing and payment processing costs, and they gain several tracking and communication components that they may not have had before.
The CRM tools are robust. What customers will enjoy the most is not having to wait on the phone on hold when they have a question or problem: EBPP allows for interaction with customers’ questions, needs and even promotional offers through built-in interactive PDFs, which cut down on phone traffic for customer service calls. Having billing reminders and easier payment options plus the interactive communication platform creates a win-win for everyone involved at minimal cost, but with maximum savings.
Going back to the initial myth about some people’s misconceptions about how difficult it might be to install or use this new technology, EBPP actually work seamlessly alongside existing accounting AR systems. It can be fully integrated or used in tandem or as a stand-alone system allowing businesses to still generate the more expensive paper bills for those customers who don’t use internet. The EBPP is multilingual and can be formatted to multiple currencies and because it’s non-technical, there is little training required to use it. Best of all, it frees up AR staff to focus on other tasks, since this system does all of the billing electronically.
Right now, the adoption rate for EBPP systems is trending upward and growing rapidly due to its many benefits. For those who are interested in leveraging the EBPP technology and putting it to work for their company, CTP Solutions can provide a scalable system to fit any company’s size or need.
For more information about EBPP, please email CTP President Jack Schachtel at: jschachtel@CTPsolutions.com or call: 818-597-1222 (ext. 304).