How to Cut the Cost of Payment Processing

At Coveted Financial Services, one of the most important ways we add value for our greater Chicago clients is by helping to implement new technologies to streamline work, add security, and trim overhead costs. Computers have done much to make business processes easier, although in many offices, Accounts Payable still lags behind in using new technology for economy and efficiency.

American businesses spend about $500 billion on the direct cost of making payments, including labor, processing costs, and time wasted waiting for manual handoffs between staff and management. You know the drill: a bill is received and routed one way for approval and another for payment. Then the business owner finds some time to sign checks, sending them back to the staff to mail. Each time the payment changes hands, errors must be avoided or they can result in late fees, annoyed vendors, and the needless internal cost of repeating the whole process.

On average, a check costs the average business about $22 to process, so writing 100 checks each month adds a hefty $26,400 to your overhead. The good news is that new AP technology offers major savings, in time and money, by reducing the convoluted payments process to just a few clicks.

Think of how much you could save in office labor, check stock, printing and mailing, not to mention the tedium of signing every check. When an office converts from manual payments to one of the latest AP processing systems, staff time devoted to payments can be reduced by half.

Beyond the direct savings in time and money, fully-automated AP processing improves the quality of work through machine intelligence, with the ability to spot typos, detect duplicate payments and time selected payments to capture discounts or maximize cash flow.

Best of all, instead of repeating the same low-value tasks every month, experienced office staff are free to focus on ways to be more productive and help grow the business. A Coveted Financial advisor can explain how this works, and how quickly it can be implemented.

The latest systems are capable of reading each invoice and automatically entering the data for human review. Based on your unique and trusted procedures, you set up the workflows and approval rules. Your team eliminates the back-and-forth by working in real time. When an approval is needed, a request can be sent (or approval given) via computer or mobile device – anytime, anywhere. 

Dispensing entirely with checks, payments can be sent to each vendor with just a few clicks. Then the payment system syncs with your accounting system, avoiding redundant data entry and speeding up reconciliation. You can even make international payments in other currencies.

Millions of business already reap the benefits of automated AP processing. For our clients, Coveted works with Bill.com, the industry leader used by over 70% of the top 100 US accounting firms and handling over $70 billion in transactions.

If you run a Chicagoland business with a conventional system for processing payments, please contact us to implement new technologies.