Why Businesses Need Bill Pay Services for B2B
In periods of economic uncertainty, the last thing a business needs is to spend much time worrying about how its bills get paid. And these days, thanks to technological advances, businesses can ditch the anxiety.
After all, where once companies were stuck paying paper bills by mail or in-person, online B2B bill pay solutions make it so that companies can pay bills quickly, easily preserve their records, and keep their customers happy, among other benefits.
Join us as we explore how B2B bill pay services work in general, a few of the major benefits of these services, and how providers like Stampli can help companies start making use of them today.
The Basics: How B2B Bill Pay Services Work
Pick a company and chances are that if its payments aren’t electronic, they will be soon. In November 2020, the National Automated Clearing House Association referenced a study by the Association of Financial Professionals that found nearly a third of B2B payments were already electronic while 36% called conversion very likely and another 22% deemed it a priority.
With the business-to-business world trending toward electronic payments, it makes sense to have tools optimized for this. Here’s how B2B bill pay services operate.
A Digital One-Stop B2B Payment Shop
If there’s one defining element of the seismic shift currently taking place in the B2B payments world, it’s that things are digitizing. PYMNTS.com notes, “The B2B Payments ecosystem is undergoing a massive digital transformation as corporates move away from paper-based processes and payments methods to digital workflows that more efficiently move money and data between trading partners.”
Finding efficient methods to move money between businesses is vital, with Mastercard estimating the annual B2B payment volume worldwide at a staggering $120 trillion. (For context, the United States’ annual gross domestic product is approximately $21 trillion. In fact, the annual B2B payment volume in the U.S., as reported in the Mastercard study, is higher than the national GDP, at $25 trillion)
A lot of money is now moving through cloud-based “one-stop B2B payment shops,” websites and software where companies can pay all of their bills in one go. All these companies have to do is gather which bills they want to be paid through B2B bill pay services, upload payment information to these services, and make sure sufficient funds are in their payment accounts each month.
Scheduled and Automatic
One of the best things about B2B bill pay services? There isn’t the monthly rigmarole of having to remember to pay every bill.
With B2B bill pay services, businesses can simply schedule for payment to go out to their vendors on a set day every month and it will happen automatically. So long as payment information or amounts due don’t change, businesses can essentially set it and forget, as the saying goes.
Along those lines, though, businesses shouldn’t fly completely blindly and keep paying the same bills indefinitely without checking. Periodic audits will help to ensure that businesses aren’t paying for redundant or phantom goods or for services that they no longer need.
Mobile and Remote Capable
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shifted more and more businesses to remote operations, even in the world of payments. B2B bill pay services help make it so that bills can be paid anytime, from anywhere in the world. All a user needs is a device capable of accessing the payment platform and a copy of the bill they’re paying to upload it.
Even before the pandemic, in fact, there’d been a push to usher in more mobile payment terminals to the B2B world, with PYMNTS.com noting in January 2020 that the historic norm of invoicing and waiting for payment via snail mail “has obvious drawbacks, and the immediate benefit of a mobile payment acceptance solution is accelerated receivables and cash flow.”
The Benefits: Why to Opt for B2B Bill Pay Solutions
So what’s the point of signing up for a B2B payment service (or opting for accounts payable automation software that includes end-to-end payment options) when people have long been able to pay bills by hand for free?
Here are three primary benefits of B2B bill pay solutions to consider.
1. More Time Saved for Higher Value Tasks
Let’s face it: Paying a stack of bills by hand every month is tedious, both for your AP clerks and for the controllers, CFOs, and other managers who must oversee this work. More than this, the tedium is unnecessary and can distract from better uses of staff time.
Adopting a B2B bill pay service can help begin to streamline all of the work and help companies save a lot of time in processing. As small business lender Fundera notes, “By adopting a B2B payments solution, you save time for yourself, your team, and your customers. Your customer doesn’t need to write and mail a check to you. And you don’t need to deposit and reconcile the check.”
By extension, companies with fully-evolved B2B bill pay services and processes also save themselves money. They can allocate their accounting staff for more high-value tasks than simply paying a bill, such as analyzing payment trends or monitoring for signs of payables fraud.
2. Better Record Keeping and Organization
U.S.-based businesses can be audited at any time, seemingly for any reason by the Internal Revenue Service. Smart companies regularly perform their own audits anyhow, knowing that it’s better to be clear on their liabilities than to have a regulatory agency catch them flat-footed. In either case, companies already using B2B bill pay services will find themselves better prepared, with records they can instantly reference.
Among the many benefits of using bill paying services for B2B, they offer superior record keeping and organizational capabilities to their companies. The reason for this: Whenever bills are paid through B2B bill pay solutions a virtual paper trail is created, making record keeping automatic. It also ensures that all payment records are kept in a centralized, digital location.
3. Happier Vendors
Another byproduct of cleaner bill payment operations? Vendors who are less likely to make problems for accounting staff.
Instead of anxious queries wondering when they’ll get paid, a company’s vendors and suppliers can rest more secure knowing that payment is coming. Good bill pay software can prevent the kind of blow-ups that can torpedo a company-vendor relationship. B2B bill pay solutions can even help make it more likely that a vendor will grant an early payment discount.
Vendor happiness might be a more important consideration for companies than would appear at first glance. As one expert wrote in August 2020 about the importance of good UX in B2B payment applications, “I believe that those companies which are busy developing B2B payment experiences on-par with consumer facing interfaces are the ones that will win big in the future. In fact, this is such a crucial topic that we will see a shake-out of the companies that don’t.”
Getting Started: Using Stampli to Pay B2B Bills
For businesses that have decided to implement B2B bill pay solutions, the next step is finding a company that can do this. Here’s what Stampli brings to the table.
Complete Invoice Management with Stampli Direct Pay
In October 2020, Stampli launched its Direct Pay service, with TechCrunch noting at the time that Stampli, which was already offering an accounts payable invoice management platform, was “poised to take on a variety of new competitors with an obvious differentiator.”
The reason Stampli Direct Pay is such a vital differentiator is that some other invoice management platforms lack payment options, forcing companies to go beyond their accounting system to pay their bills. Or, even if the systems do have payment options, they might be kind of limited.
Stampli Direct Pay, on the other hand, is payment agnostic, allowing companies to pay their vendors in whichever manner they prefer. This provides a complete, end-to-end invoice management experience for any company that uses Stampli AP Automation.
Superior Vendor Relationship Tools
Another thing that sets Stampli apart is how much the system prioritizes vendor relationships. The software includes communications at the top of invoices, keeping all stakeholders abreast of the latest developments with a particular bill.
The relationship management tools go beyond this, too. Companies also have the option to give their vendors access to the system and allow them to update their information within it. In turn, the system can automatically notify companies when vendor info changes.
B2B Bill Pay Services in Weeks, not Months
One last thing to note here: For anyone nervous about overhauling their B2B payment system, thinking it might be an intense amount of work, Stampli can get a system up and running within days.
It’s all part of easing anxieties for both companies and their vendors and creating a first-rate vendor payment experience.
Make your bill pay a-okay. Try Stampli Direct Pay today.
