ETD: 962 SPECIAL REPORT - Businesses Adopt Online Payments to
Improve Cash Flow and Save Time and Money.
E-Tailer's Digest
etd_post at gapent.com
Mon Mar 13 11:24:07 GMT 2006
E-Tailer's Digest --- Everything for the Retailer
Issue #0962 March 14, 2006
George Matyjewicz, Moderator mailto:georgem at gapent.com
Published by: GAP Enterprises, Ltd. http://www.etailersdigest.com
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CONTENTS
[1] Greetings
[2] SPECIAL REPORT - Businesses Adopt Online Payments to Improve
Cash Flow and Save Time and Money.
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[1] Greetings.
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Hi All:
Today we have a special report entitled "Businesses Adopt Online
Payments to Improve Cash Flow and Save Time and Money" by list member
Jules Kaplan, Chairman & Founder of Inovium Corporation. It is a
great report and a good way to save time and money in your
business. It's not just your check writing from your online bank account.
If Jules would take this one step further, and provide a Just-In-Time
Payment System, he would have executed my doctoral dissertation.
What do you think? Does this fit in with what you are doing?
Now, let's get to everything for the retailer.
Sincerely
George Matyjewicz, PhD
Chief Global Strategist, GAP Enterprises, Ltd.
mailto:georgem at gapent.com
http://www.etailersdigest.com
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[2] Businesses Adopt Online Payments to Improve Cash Flow and Save
Time and Money.
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+ + + + + S P E C I A L R E P O R T + + + + +
"Businesses Adopt Online Payments to
Improve Cash Flow and Save Time and Money."
By Jules Kaplan, Chairman / Founder
Inovium Corporation
Scottsdale, Arizona
A substantial number of businesses are adopting online payment
systems in order to improve cash flow and save time by reducing
paperwork. The process typically begins when customers complete a
check authorization form online or fax a paper version of the form to
the company. One of the two different types of online payment systems
available then generates a paper check that can be taken to the bank
for deposit. The other type of system transmits the information to
the Federal Reserve's network for processing. In either case, this
approach avoids problems with late payments and collection as well as
the paperwork associated with billing and accounts receivable. In the
second case, the funds go directly into the company's account, also
avoiding the time and expense associated with making bank deposits.
"We are receiving well over 50% of our payments from customers
through electronic checks," said Joseph Lopez, Credit Director at
Kinray, the largest independent wholesaler of pharmaceutical and
health and beauty products. . "The advantage is that we get our money
much faster, which improves our cash flow, and we eliminate all of
the paperwork associated with waiting for the check to come in the mail."
Conventional paper billing and collection methods are a major
headache for most businesses. Gartner, a top research organization,
estimates that it costs $2 to $5 to send a paper bill and $10 to
process a paper check. Based on a labor rate of $30 per hour,
estimated costs of a single conventional paper invoice include
invoice include $2.10 for preparation of the invoice data, $2.00 for
printing and stuffing the envelope, $1.00 for mailing the envelope,
$0.37 for postage, $5.00 for a reminder call, $1.75 to record the
incoming check, $2.05 to deposit the check, and $0.10 for the deposit
fee, for a total of $14.37. Another problem is the delays and
uncertainty associated with conventional paper billing. Even when the
check really is in the mail, it can easily take 10 to 15 days for it
to be delivered, deposited, and for the funds to be collect and
available for use. And, of course, there's always the occasional
customer that delays paying their bills, which makes it necessary to
spend additional time and effort in the collection process and, in
the most extreme cases, even makes it necessary to write debts off as
uncollectible.
Online payments will reduce your expenses and increase your bottom line
The emerging technology of online payment systems has the potential
to overcome all of these problems. It takes advantage of systems that
have been in place for many years and are currently used by most
banks and Fortune 500 companies to transfer funds between each other.
The first step is always to get the information from the customer
needed to process the payment. All that is required is typically the
customer's name, bank information, account number, check number and
check amount. You have two basic ways to process this information.
One is to purchase software that accepts the customer's check
information, which can be entered either by your employee or by the
customer himself in an online form, then prints the customer's check
on blank stock so you can deposit it in your bank. The other approach
saves even more time by using a service that moves the payment
through the Federal Reserve Automated Clearing House (ACH) electronic
funds transfer (EFT) system, eliminating the need for depositing the
funds in the bank. Instead, the funds move directly from your
customer's bank into your account.
How does this approach compare to the alternative of accepting credit
cards from customers? The major advantage is that the fees are much
smaller. The discount rate charged to the company that accepts credit
card payments is typically 2% up to 4% for certain credit card
transaction, which amounts to a major hit. Another disadvantage of
credit card payments is that businesses and consumers are used to
paying by check. The fees involved in online payments are much
smaller. Software that generates checks for bank deposit is sold for
a one-time price that is typically under $500 and the only additional
cost is the per-transaction cost of fifteen cents average for the
blank check stock and special toner cartridge needed to print
magnetic codes on the checks required by banks for processing. The
second more automated approach, where the payment is processed
through the Federal Reserve, requires only a minimal registration fee
of several hundred dollars and a small fixed per-transaction fee,
that is generally only 34 cents instead of a percent of the sale like
a credit card transaction. Thus online payment provides a huge cost
savings over credit card payments. But it should be noted that if you
have customers that prefer credit card payments, they could easily be
integrated with online payments, providing the customer with a choice
of which method to use. In this situation, it often makes sense to
charge the customer an extra fee to defray the credit card discount rate.
Automating the entire accounts receivable process
Another advantage of online payment systems is the potential they
provide for offering further operating efficiencies by automating the
entire billing and collection process. This approach applies mainly
to companies that bill a significant number of customers each month.
These companies typically incur substantial expenses for printing and
mailing invoices, collection calls, providing replacement invoices,
and depositing and recording checks, that can be eliminated or
substantially reduced with an end-to-end online payment system. In
this scenario, companies upload their monthly billing to the online
payment system. The customers are immediately notified via email or
by fax and view the invoices online. The customers can then pay
online using true 128-bit SSL encryption in seconds either by credit
card or via electronic funds transfer for processing through the
United States Federal Reserve Bank. Besides saving the cost of
sending a paper bill and processing a manual check, the time from
when the customer makes the payment until the funds are available for
use is reduced by one to two weeks.
Companies that use this approach can send messages by email or fax to
a single customer, all customers that meet certain criteria, or all
of their customers. This makes it easy to, for example, automatically
send gentle reminder messages to customers whose balances exceed 30
days and to send a sterner notice to those over 60 days. Also you
would have the ability to send important notices to all your
customers, example up coming sales or special events. Companies can
also review their customer transaction history and payables balances
at any time. Companies have the option to charge their customers a
small service fee for the convenience of making online payments. By
the same token, they can provide their customers with the opportunity
to save money by automating their own payment process. Customers can
automate the process of paying regular invoices. This approach
provides the opportunity to reduce their costs of billing and
collection by more than 60% by eliminating the time-consuming and
costly process of sending paper invoices to customers, sending
reminder letters and replacements for lost invoices, and recording
and depositing checks.
How two companies use online payments
Andrew Bloch, CFO and Alan Cusson, IT Manager of The Hamilton
Company, Boston, Massachusetts, a large property management company,
stated "that we have been looking for a solution where we could send
a statement to our many tenants either by email or fax and to allow
our tenant to be able to make payment over the Internet. Our company
processes a significant number of transactions each month and it is
very costly to send out statements. The problem with paper checks is
that it takes a lot of time and money to handle them," Block and
Cusson stated. "So we began encouraging our tenants to use Inovium
Solutions to pay either by Electronic Check or by Credit Card. They
simply login to a secure site, using their unique user id and
password and select the item to be paid and select the type of
payment and financial information to process the payment, upon
confirming the transaction, the tenant and The Hamilton Company
receive a confirmation of the transaction either by email or by fax.
The tenant like it because they will be able to make their rent
payment on time, where ever they are located. It is also an asset to
our many student tenants who parents pay their rent directly to our
company on behalf of their children. They don't have to go to the
post office or send the rent payment by express service to make sure
the rent is paid on time. We have the security of having the payment
in our hand at the time of the transaction and it is deposited
automatically rather than waiting for it to arrive in the mail. We
also do not need too prepare a bank deposit and run it down to the
bank. We expect to do approximately 6000 plus transaction per month
using this method and it really is a well thought out process."
Tom Palermo is Program Administrator for Allen, Lewis & Associates,
Jacksonville, Florida, and the nation's largest collection agency
specializing in serving music stores that sell on the installment
plan. "When we call the customer who owes money for a music purchase
and they say they are ready to pay, we take their check information
right over the phone. In the past, we used to print out a check and
deposit it in the bank but now we have moved to an online system that
moves the money right into our account. This saves us the man-hours
of printing the check, setting up a deposit and taking it to the
bank. We also save the special toner and check paper. Best of all,
the charge for a bad check is reduced from $5 to $1.25 by going
through the Federal Reserve System. Since we get an average of 4,000
checks a month with about 500 of them returned for NSF, which amounts
to a major savings. These savings offset the cost of the EFT Service
and increase bottom line. Online check writing has streamlined our
entire cash receipts system and saved us a lot of money." All in all,
it's clear that online payment systems have the potential to improve
competitiveness by dramatically reducing the cost of billing and collections.
For more information, visit www.inovium.com
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