How automated payments can improve your competitive advantage

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If you’ve been following our blog for a while, you will be well on your way to developing some strategies to improve the way you do business so that you can increase your cash flow and ultimately your profits – great! You already know that automated payments can help you to get paid faster, decrease the cost of doing business and improve your internal business efficiencies. Obviously this is all great news for extracting the maximum value out of your internal business processes and improving your business’ cash flow position, but did you know that automated payments could affect how your business performs alongside external forces as well?

The fact is, implementing the right automated payments solution to reduce administration time and increase your cash flow translates to a massive competitive advantage for your business on a much larger scale – here’s how.

 

Automated payments are the default option for the bigger players

People are already using direct debit to pay for their gym membership, insurance, phone bill, internet, childcare and more. This means your customers are highly likely to welcome the convenience of paying you by direct debit as well. Shifting your customers onto smaller more manageable payments, paid automatically by direct debit, will be good for your cash flow, could potentially reduce the perceived total cost of your product or service in your customers’ minds and will give you another tool to help you to compete with the bigger players.

 

Automated payments make it easy for your customers to buy from you

To succeed in today’s highly competitive post-GFC business environment, you need to implement astute business management processes into all areas of your business – particularly those processes that relate to your inbound cash flow. One sure strategy to maintaining your competitive advantage (without resorting to decreasing your prices) is to make it easy for your customers to buy from you.

Mobile technology means your customer could be doing business with you while they’re picking up the kids from school, having lunch or working out at the gym. The customer transaction landscape has changed and you need to change with it. If you can’t offer the convenient payment options that your customers want (such as direct debit or BPAY), it’s you who will ultimately pay the price of lost customers.

 

Automated payments software yields fast ROI

The time it takes you to find and implement the right automated payments solution for your business will be an astute investment – in fact, many businesses realise their return on investment in the first month after switching to automated payments.

If you’ve ever benchmarked how much time your team members are really putting into manually processing your customers’ payments (for help on how to do this, read this article on how to reduce the price of payments administration in your business) chances are you’ve already uncovered the real hidden cost of manual payments administration for your business AND set yourself some measurable goals around reducing this time – great!

Your next step is to find and implement the perfect automated payments solution for your business – an easy-to-implement solution that will enable you to achieve your efficiency goals by automating your most repetitive manual tasks and removing any tasks that are unnecessarily duplicated – so you can start yielding that return on investment sooner.

 

Big benefits and easy to use

If you were to implement the right automated payments solution into your business today, everybody across your business would start to reap the benefits immediately. Your staff will appreciate their reduced manual administration workload and your customers will welcome the offer of more convenient payment options.

To find out just how easy automated payments software can be to use, call us now to discuss.

 

Specialising in Xero bookkeeping, Notch Above is a Brisbane bookkeeper and BAS Agent located in Alderley that offers Xero setup, as well as training and ongoing support.  Notch Above can take care of all the bookkeeping tasks you would rather not do, like bank reconciliations, supplier payments, payroll services, debtor control and BAS returns.

Thanks to Ezidebit for providing this article.

Sales & Online Invoicing in Xero

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Xero accounting software helps make your sales and invoicing process easy to manage. Even invoicing your clients and getting paid is a fast and seamless process.

With Xero, when you email your customer an invoice, they can access it online and pay in a few seconds with the click of a button. If they use Xero too, they can even save the invoice directly into their Xero organisation. It’s the magic of online invoicing.

There’s plenty you can do to keep track of your sales in Xero. Simply head to the accounts menu and selects ‘Sales’ to get to the sales dashboard. The graphs and charts make it easy to see who owes what and when it’s due – so you know who needs to be followed up.

You can search by contact, invoice number, reference or other filters. Drilling down will take you to your full invoice listing, where you can navigate by tab and sortable columns. By clicking on the expected date on an invoice, you can flag when you expect a payment to arrive, which will reflect on the ‘money coming in’ figures on your dashboard and help you keep a handle on cashflow.

Check out this video tutorial to learn how to master online invoicing and how to use the sales dashboard in Xero.

Manage bills and purchases in Xero

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Managing your bills and purchases in Xero accounting software helps you stay organised, stay on top of cashflow and pay your suppliers on time.

The Purchases tab in Xero gives a complete, easy-to-understand overview of your bills and purchase orders. Here you can create a new bill, repeating bill or purchase order.

Source documents can be uploaded to attach or simply drag-and-dropped in. Bills can be saved as a draft, submitted for approval, sent off and even batch-paid.

This video tutorial goes into more detail so you can see how to manage bills and purchases within Xero accounting software.

Billable expenses in Xero

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Sometimes to get the job done you’ll incur expenses you need to bill back to the customer. In Xero you can easily track billable expenses and include them on your next sales invoice.

While you’re entering the bill, simply mark any items as billable that you intend to recover from the customer later. Then when you go to invoice the customer, you’ll see there are billable expenses waiting to be included.

If you’re using multi-currency, choose the currency you’re invoicing in and Xero will make the conversion based on exchange rates from XE.com.

Keep track of billable expenses and stay on top of invoicing customers with Xero!

How to connect Xero to Gmail

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Bring all your customer activity, transactions and emails together in one place with Gmail integration in Xero.

To set up, select the email tab in any contact and ‘Connect to Gmail’.
You will then be prompted to sign into your google account.

Accept the connection and that’s it – your Gmail account and Xero organisation are now linked.

All emails between you and your customer will be visible to you in their contact record.

You can also add individual emails to the activity stream so other Xero users in your business can see them too.

If you’ve ever missed out on a sales opportunity before you’ll love this – simply add an email to a new Invoice, Quote or bill.

Connecting Xero to Gmail makes it easier to grow your customer relationships.

Back to Basics

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Sometimes we forget the basics of software programs we may have been using for a while or we simply didn’t ever learn them to start with – so here’s a quick video on shortcuts you can use to make life easier in Xero.

Two Step Authentication

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Keeping your financial data safe from malware and hackers is imperative.
Xero has a Two Step Authentication process. If your login details are ever compromised you can be sure those seeking to do the wrong thing won’t be able to access your account.

All is revealed in this quick video

Notifications in Xero

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Notifications in Xero makes it easy to stay on top of what’s new, what’s important and what you need to know or learn – in the one place where you work everyday.

No more searching an Inbox. No more missing an update. Explore when you want… get updated when you need to know.  Coming in Xero’s release on the 9th of February

Sales quotes in Xero Released

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On Wednesday Xero released the ability to issue quotes from the software.

Many small businesses win work by using sales quotes. Quotes drive sales, which, in turn, generate revenue and build relationships with customers.

Yet many businesses don’t realise that quotes can also cost them business. Revenue can be lost by not following up on a quote, or by not turning quotes around fast enough.

In this video learn how Quotes in Xero works so you can streamline your sales process and grow your business revenue. If you require further help with quotes please call us today.