Paytelligence for Sage Accpac ERP

In most businesses the process of accepting payments from customers remains a largely manual process, and in many cases a process where multiple individuals are involved. This is true of payments made by check, credit card, wire transfer or even cash.

To understand the real cost of accepting a payment we need to look at the payments from when they are received to the time the funds clear the bank. This process can be divided into three steps: accepting the payment, reconcilement, and preparing and delivering the deposit.

Accepting Payment:

Accepting a payment requires considerable employee time. If a payment is by check, someone has to receive the mail, deliver it to the accounting department where someone will open an envelope and then must match that payment to an invoice. If a payment is by credit card, someone will have to take the customers credit card number (a potential security risk), key the credit card number, expiry date and amount of the payment in to a credit card terminal (physical terminal or Internet based Virtual Terminal), and then write down the Authorization number received.

Reconciling the Payment:

Once a payment has been received it needs to be reconciled with an invoice in the accounting system. In some cases this process may be preformed by a different person than the individual that accepted the payment to begin with, opening up the potential for inevitable and costly data-entry errors. If the payment is by credit card a capture or settlement function needs to be performed to inform the credit card networks to move funds from the customer’s credit card to your merchant account – in most cases this is another manual process.

Depositing the Payment:

Once a payment has been received and reconciled funds need to be deposited in a bank. For check payments someone will generally have to physically go to a bank and deposit funds. Payments via credit cards have the advantage of an electronic transfer of funds from a merchant account to an associated deposit account.

Automating Payment Processing:

If you have not in some fashion automated the process of accepting payments from customers, you may be surprised about the true costs. What do you pay employees that handle payments, how many hours each week do you have employees sorting, handling, tallying, performing data entry on or delivering your check payments or manually processing credit card payments? Is it cheap? Is it even actually cost effective?

To help you assess the costs of accepting credit cards manually and in an automated fashion we have included on this web site a Return on Investment Calculator. The calculator compares the process of accepting credit card payments using traditional manual methods to accepting credit cards in an automated fashion using Paytelligence; however, it would equally valid to compare the cost of accepting paper checks with the cost of accepting those same payments via credit card.

In summary, the cost of your payments must include not only the actual cost per transaction (transaction fee or discount rate), but also the real numbers you spend for labor and the time you wait to receive the funds. While many of these can be considered “cost-of-businesses expenses (labor costs, settlement times and bank fees), if there was a way to reduce or eliminate these expenses (and thereby increase profits), would you make the change?

Many studies suggest that to handle a single payment using traditional, manual methods takes from 10 to 15 minutes; in other words from $3 to $5 per payment, not including costs that may be incurred due to data entry errors.

If you use Sage Accpac ERP, Paytelligence is the answer to automating the process of accepting payments. We believe that Paytelligence can improve the process of accepting payments by a factor of four to six and that any business processing as few as 200 payments per month would see a quick payback from an investment in Paytelligence.

Coming Soon: Accept ACH Payments with Paytelligence.