Are your sales growing rapidly? Do you find yourself having to find and onboard new team members? Is your brand getting in front of more customers?
If you’ve answered “Yes” to these questions, then your business is clearly on the path towards higher growth. And while scaling a business is a worthwhile endeavor, achieving healthy and sustainable business growth in this competitive climate is no small feat.
Secondly, it’s about as good a time as any to take a moment and appreciate the costs of scaling. Between hiring, buying, or renting office space, and overall costs, it’s true that fast growth can cause a lot of headaches. Especially if that expansion comes within a short period. That’s why it is essential to understand your business expenses.
Knowing the ins and outs of increasing business expenses will better sustain your newfound pace of growth.
One expense that’s often overlooked by enterprise businesses is the cost of merchant services. It may not seem like a huge priority, but the fact is optimizing your enterprise payment processing costs can ultimately free up more financial and human resources to boost growth.
What Are Merchant Services and Can They Help in Scaling Business Growth?
Merchant services refer to the system where your business can accept credit and debit card payments from customers. A merchant bank or payment processor will usually facilitate this system. They also transfer the payments to your business account as they come through.
Having these systems is crucial for business growth. While most customers still use cash for transactions under $10, credit card processing and digital payments are on the rise.
The more efficient you are with accepting payments, the better you can serve your customers and the faster you can scale.
Accomplishing all that starts with integrated payments. Enterprise payment systems typically have multiple components that include the following:
- Merchant account
- Payment processing solutions
- Payment gateway
- Point of sale system (POS)
- eCommerce platform
- Payment technology
The key is to integrate these components so they function seamlessly. In doing so, you’ll be well-equipped to accept and process multiple payment options.
How Do Integrated Payment Solutions Work for a Growing Business?
Leveling up your payment technology and merchant service system into integrated solutions brings many benefits to your business. As the term suggests, this integrated payment system works with your other business programs. These segments can include:
- Your customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Your finance or accounting books
- Your procurement programs
- Your enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions
By connecting to these different programs, you can manage your business expenses more efficiently. In fact, depending upon the features of your merchant services system, you can manage various business aspects easily.
That’s why integrated payment solutions are becoming a popular way to handle revenues and costs for growing businesses. The following advantages highlight a few popular ways that an integrated system helps a growing organization.
Automatic Tracking of Finances
Typically, receiving payments means that you must enter those revenues manually into your books. This manual input takes time away from other critical business activities. But it also leaves room for human error and causes you to have inaccurate data.
Traditional processes can lead to you never knowing the exact details of your revenue and expenses. As a result, you may end up making financial decisions that are against the actual picture. These improper decisions can lead to disastrous outcomes while trying to grow your business.
This particular flaw can also affect your credibility during audits and inspections. Your books and your portfolio can lose their positive projection to existing stakeholders and potential investors. As a result, your business essentially loses any traction before it can grow or scale.
But with integrated merchant services, you no longer have to make manual adjustments to your financial books. Your integrated payment system performs the required changes according to your revenue. This tool optimizes for accuracy in income reporting and record keeping.
This prevents any room for errors while also saving you time for optimal productivity. As a result, you and your staff can focus on other aspects of your business instead of performing redundant tasks.
Better Customer Support and Relationship Management
Businesses that don’t have integrated payment systems must spend more time on manual data entry in addition to other tasks.
For instance, when you receive a payment from a customer, there is no way to tie the payment to them in your CRM system without manual data entry. Once again, this takes a lot of time. But seeing that this information is essential in managing business expenses, investing in the right products, and providing better customer experiences, you have to do it anyway.
And in some instances where you forget to enter the data, you may not understand how loyal a customer is to your business or what kind of products they like the most. This lack of proper data affects your relationship with your customers and your business growth.
When you use integrated merchant services, it seamlessly manages these costs for growing businesses. Payments are processed through your CRM just as they do through your POS. As a result, you can continue to scale your business with better customer relationship management.
Smoother Procurement Processes
Business expenses go hand in hand with procurement and purchase processes. This is especially true when you are going through a phase of business growth.
The process with ordinary merchant services solutions remains the same as the other aspects mentioned above. If your books are not updated accurately, you won’t have a clear picture of your actual financial standing. That means you won’t know if you can spend extra funds on your office space or go big with your inventory.
To put it simply, making such decisions without accurate data is like taking a shot in the dark. If you do it anyway, you may reach your goals, but it is improbable. Thus, many business owners dread making larger procurement decisions.
Once again, integrated payment solutions can manage these costs for growing businesses more efficiently. With accurate data coming right from the POS, you can rest assured that what you can see in your books is exactly what you have in your accounts. This makes it easier to make crucial procurement decisions. As a result, you can scale your business consistently.
Better Assessment of Business Standing
An integrated merchant services platform not only helps you increase your revenues, it also lets you optimize costs from the ground up.
It allows you to manage your invoices, procurement processes, or customer profiles using a single solution. This new process saves you time, increases your efficiency, and lets you focus on your business growth.
These payment solutions also help you make staffing decisions that relate to business expenses. Making plans for expanding your office space, hiring new staff, and managing existing benefits are all great examples.
You can use these solutions to better focus on your customers. With accurate data and better financial management, you can invest your time in other business aspects. You may also develop better customer experience programs, create new products, or introduce discount programs for customers.
All of this can help you manage the costs of growing businesses while scaling them.
Cost-effective Payment Processing
Enterprise businesses typically incur higher payment processing costs because they have larger sales and transaction volumes. That’s why many growing businesses quickly see their processing fees balloon as they scale.
But this doesn’t have to be the case. With a payments provider such as Stax, you can continuously grow your business while keeping your processing fees in check.
Unlike other merchant services providers, Stax gives you access to the direct cost of interchange. We don’t take a cut out of your sales. Instead, you’re charged a flat membership fee to gain access to wholesale credit card rates without expensive markups.
This enables you to keep more profits out of each sale and have a healthier bottom line.
How to Select the Best Payment Platform for Business Growth
Overall, integrated merchant service solutions play a very crucial role in helping you scale your business. The key is to select a platform that is truly integrated with a host of business applications. This simplification helps you manage your operations as efficiently as possible.
Designed to grow with your business, Stax brings your entire payment experience into one easy-to-use platform. The payment system is designed in a way that offers maximum capabilities in an intuitive interface.
Whether your business is in the early stages of growth or the later stages, feel free to contact Stax. We will be happy to discuss your requirements and help you manage your business expenses with ease.
