Payment technology may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you’re thinking about improving business efficiency, but the fact is that the integrated payment systems you use can play a crucial role in streamlining your processes and operations.
When your payments systems are seamlessly connected to other components of your business, you can unlock several benefits, including time savings, more productivity, and higher customer satisfaction.
This is where integrated payment platform services come in.
Integrated payment platforms go beyond simple debit and credit card processing. These payment systems can also help you streamline your business operations. From analyzing your revenues to managing customer expectations, they can assist you in achieving crucial goals in a super simple way.
Here’s how these integrated payment processing platforms can help your business.
Why Do You Need an Integrated Payment System?
If you use a conventional merchant services solution, then you will be well aware of the end-of-day processes that come with entertaining debit and credit card processing methods.
You know the drill.
First, you have to save all your receipts throughout the day. Then, you have to manually reconcile them before you can enter them into your accounting software. Only after putting everything through this process, can you finally put your payments through. After that you can receive your payments in your merchant account.
As you might be aware, this process takes place every single day so you can maintain a steady cash flow for your business. If your accounting slips for even a single day and the receipts pile up, then you’ll find yourself with countless hours of data entry work. When left unattended, these tasks grow increasingly redundant with each passing day.
That’s where integrated payment processing platforms can help you refine your business activities.
How Does an Integrated Payment System Work?
Integrated payment systems work by streamlining the payment acceptance process and integrating automatic payment acceptance.
They work by doing away with traditional tedious processes such as manual storage and compilation of transaction information. Further, they eliminate the need to connect written copies of transaction information with digital invoices to match payments to the right invoices. They also eliminate the need for you to tinker with your ledgers regarding payments afterward.
Instead of reconciling invoices or manually processing payments, integrated platforms automatically process and post payments to its associated sale or invoice.
As a result, you no longer have to enter the same payment information into different systems manually. Your payments go through as soon as they are processed at the time of the transaction itself. It doesn’t get any simpler than that, does it?
But that’s not all that an integrated payment system can do for your business.
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How Integrated Payment Systems Solutions Help Your Business
The following features of integrated payment processing platforms make them a sought-after solution for all kinds of businesses. These aspects seamlessly translate into tangible benefits that can help any business scale right according to their expectations.
To help you understand the advantages of having an integrated payment system, here are a few ways how this mechanism can help your business.
1. Saves You Time
One of the most evident advantages of using an integrated payment service for merchants comes in the form of speedy processes.
For starters, you no longer have to perform redundant data-entry tasks. This way, you can save the time that is otherwise wasted in repeatedly punching in the same details into various systems.
This process improvement goes a long way in helping you manage your employees’ time in a better manner. It also shortens the gap between your customers’ transactions and when you receive your earnings in your merchant account.
Did you know that you could also set up recurring payments? Integrated payment systems may include scheduling features linked to payment data that make it easy to bill without having to repeat actions regularly.
These simple benefits have a butterfly effect throughout your payment processes. From making your operations more efficient in ensuring cost-efficient procedures, you can see how this little advantage boosts your business performance in a significant manner.
2. Improves the Customer Experience
Having an integrated payments system can also help you serve customers better. Integrating your payment processor with your POS system facilitates the smooth transfer of data from one platform to the next.
This is particularly helpful during the checkout process because it means that cashiers can ring up sales faster. Instead of manually keying in the amount into the point of sale system, an integrated solution automatically syncs the necessary transaction data, so your staff can complete the sale much more quickly.
This leads to a faster checkout experience, shorter lines, and ultimately happier customers.
3. Improves Your Cash Flow
A significant drawback of debit card and credit card processing comes in the form of affected cash flow.
Even when you receive a large number of payments from multiple avenues such as your retail store and your website, the accounting processes associated with conventional payment systems can delay the payment transfer to your merchant account.
As a result, you must manage your costs through other avenues, which can have drastic effects on your business’ overall wellbeing.
Remember that these integrated payment processing platforms allow you to process your payments as soon as they go through. To be clear, that can mean faster deposits due to real-time payment updates and reduction of lag time with manual labor. This new implementation improves your cash flow and helps you continue increasing your operations with timely payments.
4. Cuts Your Costs
As noted above, running around multiple systems to process your payments can take a lot of time. Yet, a conventional payment system leaves you no choice but to move forward with this process at the end of every day.
Depending upon the traffic of your store, processing all transactions can take a couple of hours every day, at the very least. This time-consuming task not only increases the cost of managing your human resources but also makes for higher infrastructure charges.
Conversely, an integrated payment platform easily saves you from processing payments through multiple applications. Since you no longer have to divide your time on numerous systems, you don’t need to allocate as many resources to the process.
This feature allows you to cut your costs in a substantial way, which leads you to generate higher profits as compared to the usage of a common payment platform.
5. Allows You to Analyze Crucial Data
If you use modern merchant services or payment provider that lets you perform payment data analysis through your system, you can learn critical information about your customer’s transactions.
From cash payments to credit card processing, you’re able to analyze your revenue through easy-to-understand data points. This analysis lets you determine which payment method is popular among your target market, which in turn enables you to invest in your infrastructure accordingly.
You can also see historical data on your revenues. This historical information lets you judge your business’ performance at different times of the year. If you use multi-channel payments, you can also compare the data against multiple locations and avenues of your business.
But that’s not all. By integrating your payment processing platforms into your accounting software, you can determine your products’ performance quickly. You can see correctly which of your products are favorites among your customers. Further, you can also find out which ones are grossly underperforming. This system lets you make decisions on further investments in your inventory for maximizing your profits.
Another benefit? Having an integrated payments platform enables you to access various reports from one place. No need to cobble together reports from different sources; since data flows smoothly across the platform, you can view the info you need quickly and easily.
So, whether you’re looking to evaluate the performance of your business or need data for forecasting purposes, an integrated payment platform can do wonders for your business.
6. Minimizes Mistakes and Unnecessary Costs
Human error is a major issue for businesses. In fact, it’s estimated that human error costs enterprises $37 billion per year, and that’s not even counting intangible costs like reputation damages and loss of customer trust.
Integrated payments can help minimize these costs by automating tedious tasks like data entry and payment reconciliation. Data is synced automatically, so there’s virtually no room for human error and you can keep your records in check.
Monetize Payments With Stax Connect, The Best Integrated Payments System
Finding simple credit card processing equipment and software is easy. But getting integrated payment processing platforms with modern features can be a bit tricky. Build a complete integrated payments system from scratch in as little as 30 days by leveraging our relationship with the world’s leading sponsor bank.
Besides providing all the essential features discussed above, Stax Connect will also streamline risk management for you and our pre-built enrollment platform will ensure that end users can start taking payments within just 20 minutes of getting started. We also support a variety of payment methods including cards, ACH payments, invoicing, recurring billing, text-to-pay, and split payments.
FAQs about Integrated Payment System
Q: What is an integrated payment system?
An integrated payment system is a business solution that aligns payment processing with other crucial aspects of a business. It communicates with other essential software your business uses and automatically processes and posts payments to their associated sales or invoices. This system significantly lowers the cross-referencing of transaction information and reduces human error.
Q: Why should a business implement an integrated payment system?
An integrated payment system provides numerous benefits: it saves time by eliminating redundant data-entry tasks, improves customer experience by speeding up transactions, enhances cash flow through immediate payment processing, cuts costs via process automation, provides valuable data for analysis, and minimizes mistakes due to human error.
Q: How does an integrated payment system work?
Integrated payment systems streamline payment acceptance and eliminate the need for manual storage and tracking of transaction information. They seamlessly match payments with the right invoices without human intervention, thereby automating the entire payment process. Payments go through as soon as they’re processed at the time of the transaction itself.
Q: Can integrated payment systems enhance customer experience?
Yes. An integrated payment system can significantly improve customer experiences. It facilitates the smooth transfer of data from one platform to the next, which speeds up the cashiering process and reduces waiting times for customers.
Q: Do integrated payment systems assist in managing cash flow?
Yes. Traditional payment systems may delay the transfer of payments to your merchant account, which can hamper cash flow. Integrated payment platforms, on the other hand, process payments upon transaction completion, thus improving the cash flow of the business.
Q: How can integrated payment systems cut costs?
Processing payments across different systems can be time-consuming and expensive. Integrated payments, however, reduce the need for manual reconciliation, thereby freeing up resources and lowering costs.
Q: Can integrated payment systems aid in data analysis?
Yes, Integrated payment systems provide easy-to-understand data points, which are essential for in-depth payment data analysis. This feature can uncover which payment method is most popular among your customers, allowing allocation of resources accordingly.
Q: Does an integrated payment system mitigate errors?
Yes. Integrated payments streamline and automate business operations, including data entry, thereby significantly reducing the potential for human error.
Q: What services does Stax Connect provide as an integrated payment system?
Stax Connect is an integrated payment system that offers various features, such as risk management streamlining, quick enrollment, and support for different payment methods. These services help businesses streamline their payment processes and maximize efficiency.
