Everything You Need to Know About Payment Automation

Accounts Payable (AP) performance significantly affects a company’s success. If your finance department still uses manual, paper-based accounting processes to pay vendors, it could negatively impact your performance.  

Consider the top challenges facing AP:

• Inefficiencies.
• Missing or duplicated payments.
• Increased risk of fraud.
• Greater instances of human error.
• Damaged supplier relationships.

If you identify with any of these challenges, it’s time to consider a better alternative to your current accounts payable process – payment automation. By utilizing efficient electronic workflows, your AP department can eliminate check printing and envelope stuffing while reducing vendor payment delays and tedious follow-up on unprocessed payments.

What is Payment Automation?

Payment Automation is a digital, hands-off approach to managing AP and paying vendors. With a single, automated process, you can pay vendors through multiple automated methods, including virtual card, check, and ACH.

How does Payment Automation work?

• You upload:
  • When it is time to pay your vendors, all you do is upload your payment file.

• You fund:
  • You can review your batch to make sure it’s correct and fund all your payments with the touch of a button.

Once you finish these two steps, best-in-class payment automation providers handle the rest:

• Remittance:
  • Using innovative payment decisioning technology, a trained team member will remit payment and remittance details to your vendors via email, fax, telephone, or online.

• Reconciliation:
  • Reconciliation is out of your hands.  Canceled or refused payments are promptly refunded back to you.

• Dispersing of cash rewards:
  • Every quarter, leading payment automation systems will issue an ACH credit to your account and give a detailed statement showing rebates, transactions, and dollars processed.

Why should AP teams leverage Payment Automation?

By leveraging a world-class Payment Automation solution and embracing electronic payments, your organization can achieve better operational performance and transform your AP process with:

• Greater efficiency with automated remittance and reconciliation and an easy-to-use interface:
  • 80% of time saved on payment processing.
  • 5x more payments processed in the same amount of time.

• Greater speed through fast and seamless implementation that takes less than 10 hours of your time to set up:
  • 90% of your steps eliminated in payment processing.

• Greater security through encrypted account data, multi-factor authentication and a world-class security team working on your behalf:
  • On the backend, these enhanced security measures ensure that your account information is always protected.
    • 71% of survey respondents reported that their organizations were victims of payment fraud attacks in 2021¹.

• Greater support through a dedicated team of payment specialists:
  • White-glove service providers come with access to more than 100 U.S.-based customer representatives who can answer inquiries from vendors and AP teams, typically within two hours or less, guaranteeing that an organization’s AP staff is no longer required to handle payment reconciliation and follow-up.

• Improved P/L from cash-back rebates on virtual card payments and eliminating paper check supply costs:
  • The average Payment Automation user can reduce costs by 80%-90%.

• Stronger supplier relationships:
  • Delayed payments cause strained relationships with vendors while also causing businesses to lose out on perks such as early payment discounts. For example, 59% of suppliers that had been paid late reduced or halted discounts, and 62% withheld goods or services that were ordered until invoices were paid².

Payment Automation Features and Added Benefits:

• Single Sign-On:
  • Eliminates the need for multiple login credentials.

• Multi-factor Authentication:
  • Protects users by adding an extra layer of security.

• Expanded Reporting Capabilities:
  • Premier payment automation software provides on-demand reporting capabilities to users, giving them more transparency through self-service reporting. This includes a payment history report, archived documents, and a payment status report.

• Attach Supporting Documentation:
  • Supporting documentation is included with check payments, ensuring everything is always accurate.

• Global Search Functionality:
  • Saves time spent searching for payments.

• Vendor Management Enhancement:
  • Allows a user to speed up the batch process by pulling in vendors from the payment file and eliminates the need for manual entry.

• Settlement files allow for real-time reconciliation of payments:
  • Never worry about the status of a payment again.

• ERP-agnostic:
  • Best-in-class solutions seamlessly implement with a full suite of ERPs, including Blackbaud, Oracle, PointClickCare, Meditech, QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Sage, and many more.

• Ensures business continuity through a cloud-based system:
  • Cloud-based systems can be accessed safely anywhere at any time, whether you’re in the office or on the go.

• Positive Pay:
  • Paymerang supplies complimentary Positive Pay to deter check fraud and help lower your risk of a fraudulent attack. Banks use Positive Pay to match the checks a company issues with those it presents for payment to ensure there is no suspicious activity. Paymerang also provides educational content that warns users about the different types of fraud, such as vendor impersonation and business email compromise.

As demonstrated above, there are several advantages to implementing payment automation software. By eliminating manual processes, your finance team will improve AP workflows and increase efficiency, all while reducing fraud risk, improving vendor relationships, and ensuring scalability for success in the future.

To learn more about Paymerang’s Payment Automation platform, click here to schedule a demo.

Sources:

¹2021 Association of Financial Professionals (AFP) Payments Fraud & Control Survey

²PYMNTS