What You’re Missing with B2B Payment Processing

A major shift is currently underway in the B2B payment processing world, with businesses having opted in droves in recent years for cloud-based accounts payable software. But other companies are still missing out.

Whether for fear of cost, change, or other factors, some businesses still haven’t gotten onboard with AP automation software. And this is despite the time and money and any number of other benefits that B2B payment processing software can save accounting staff.

That said, it’s not too late to join the trend.

Join us as we explore the detrimental impacts of a bad B2B payments gateway, some of the benefits of implementing a cloud-based AP automation solution, and how partners like Stampli can help make this happen.

What A Bad B2B Payments Gateway Can Cost Your Business

Business-to-business payment can happen in a variety of different ways, from the ACH (automated clearing house) to credit cards to old-fashioned paper bills. In fact, the method of payment a business uses doesn’t actually matter so much. What is important is the business’s processing portal to make these payments.

Here’s what can happen when a B2B payment processing portal is defective (or non-existent.)

Extra Obstacles and Complications for Payment

A cloud-based B2B payment processing system can get vendors and suppliers paid quickly, cutting invoice approval time from days to weeks and making it easier to net discounts, often 2% to 3%, for early payment of bills. Now flip this around to see the other side, which is that sticking with an outdated accounting system or trying to do everything by hand can add undue time and stress to the payment process.

It’s easy to see the cost of this for businesses, with PYMNTS.com noting that “businesses of all sizes (and, by extension, their treasurers and chief financial officers) have seen the frictions that develop when legacy systems and manual processes become unwieldy and payment delays materialize, resulting in supplier cash crunches.”

A Worse Vendor and Supplier Experience

Supplier cash crunches, to borrow the phrase at the end of the last section, is just the tip of the iceberg for vendors and suppliers stuck waiting on payment from companies with legacy accounting systems or worse.

Pay a vendor or supplier with an outdated B2B payment processing system or with no system at all and it might take 3-4 times as long for them to receive their payment. They’ll also be stuck waiting for this payment, whether it’s by paper check, ACH remittance, or any number of other forms not necessarily knowing if or when the payment will reach them.

Treating a vendor or supplier poorly might seem harmless, but it can lead to frayed and even severed relations, as well as reputational and legal risk. It’d be one thing if these risks were unavoidable, but there’s a better path for companies that opt for online payment software.

More COVID-19 Stress

These days, as well, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, vendors and suppliers are more than likely also going to want a touch-free payment experience. Payments Journal noted in February 2021 while discussing the banking industry that:

• 82% of consumers were now reluctant to visit branches;
• 57% preferred internet banking;
• 36% had switched to an alternative banking provider.

There have been other signs of shift as well in the B2B payment world, with PYMNTS.com noting that 47% of businesses surveyed said that the pandemic had affected their processes for payment acceptance, while 42% noted that it had impacted their invoice delivery. Then there’s NACHA CEO Jane Larimer who wrote that “businesses lost in-person access to accounting systems and mail delivery, hastening the need for electronic B2B payments.”

Whatever the case, businesses that don’t adapt their B2B payment systems to the changing times are setting their vendors and suppliers up for more pandemic-related stress.

Benefits of Using an Online B2B Payments Solution

So clearly there are costs, both literal and figurative, to sticking with an outdated or defective B2B payment processing service. Here are some of the benefits of opting for a cloud-based AP automation system.

Faster Payments (and More Early Payment Discounts)

The biggest laggard for invoice payments is the approval process which takes place beforehand. By implementing a B2B payment automation solution, companies can decrease invoice processing times by 50% as Renova Energy experienced, which in turn, helps make payments happen much more quickly. By removing invoice approval laggards, the extra time gives AP the ability to capitalize on early payment discounts, this, in addition to more time to focus on forecasting and reporting.

Less Busywork for Accounting Staff

In an old, manual accounting process, staff likely lose time to vendors and suppliers querying them with calls or emails wondering about the status of their payment. Internally, AP clerks and others can also have tougher work cut out for them without good B2B payment processing software. As one automation executive noted, according to Payments Journal, “To your AP team—the people at ground level—there’s much more behind the process than sending payments.”

Better to have AP automation software handle such duties as:

• Automatically gathering purchase orders and receipt reports that prove the validity of invoices, a process known as three-way matching;

• Facilitating approvals from controllers, CFOs, and others whom the software can automatically route invoices to;

• Monitoring for signs of possible fraud, with artificial intelligence robots, like Stampli’s Billy the Bot, able to scour thousands of lines of transactions to flag ones that look suspicious.

This, in turn, can leave accounting staff to the more high-value tasks and analysis that are starting to become part and parcel of many AP jobs, even for entry-level workers. It’s just a better use of time and resources that have become increasingly scarce for businesses thanks to COVID-19.

How Stampli Can Help with B2B Payment Processing

There’s no shortage of companies these days that can help with B2B payment processing, as a quick review of Google results would show.

Here’s why to consider Stampli.

Stampli Direct Pay: A Paradigm Shifter

A lot of companies might offer B2B invoice processing without also allowing for bill payment through their platforms, forcing the businesses that they work with to go elsewhere to do this. Or they might be restrictive in the payment options they provide, not allowing businesses to pay invoices in ways that they or their customers prefer.

In October 2020, Stampli sought to remedy this by launching Stampli Direct Pay, a payment-agnostic solution that allows businesses to pay their bills whichever way they like. While the payments world has been steadily shifting away from paper checks, those are supported in Stampli Direct Pay, with it even possible to print checks from your bank account. It’s also easy to schedule and reconcile ACH transactions, with payment of various types overall streamlined.

The Stampli Approach to Payments

As we noted when we launched Stampli Direct Pay, our goal is to make payments simple and straightforward.

In that respect, Stampli doesn’t want to push the companies it works with toward any kind of payment type or platform. We believe in providing a welcoming, versatile, one-stop payment shop. It’s the kind of place where businesses never have to worry about what they might be missing. Everything they’ll need for a first-class experience paying their vendors and suppliers will be there.

How to Get Started

Whether your company invested in the past in creating a custom accounting system that took months to build and is now long since out of date or whether your firm has never used accounting software, Stampli can help.

We work with companies regularly to get AP automation systems running through our cloud-based network in weeks, not months. Give us a call to start quickly experiencing the benefits.

Simple and straightforward, the way B2B payment processing should be. Come experience Stampli Direct Pay today.