Paying the bills is an essential chore not only in our private lives but, most importantly, in our businesses. In this guide, maxpay.com experts share all the available conveniences and ways to pay business bills online from the safety of your home along with some useful tips and facts.
Get a Payment Gateway
Of course, there are online banking apps for every bank you like, but you may find yourself a little tied up on versatility with most of them, especially when it comes to making your billing smarter. That’s where a custom business payments gateway can make the entire workflow a lot less complicated for you or your accountant.
The benefits of integrating a trusted payment gateway platform into your business financial system include:
- Enhanced security – unlike average online banking applications, third-party solutions may offer a broader list of fraud prevention techniques focused particularly on business fraud types. The databases of such services are frequently updated to keep up with the enormous number of new fraudulent online schemes that pop up hourly.
- APIs – having a reliable API for online payments can solve a variety of problems, especially when it comes to service integration into your business ecosystem. You can integrate and customize APIs for hosted payment pages, payouts, balance, queries, and more.
- Advanced merchant services – when a payment platform is designed specifically for business use, it offers a line of professional services for merchants. You can enable modules for chargeback protection, managing multiple MID (Merchant IDs), PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), Ethoca Alert services for transaction disputes, documentation management, and more.
Depending on your location and industry, the list of available features on each platform may differ, but you still can minimize risks for all your business payments anywhere.
Save Time With Automated Payments
Bill automation is perhaps the biggest benefit of online payments. It lets you not only save time but also avoid forgetting to pay, getting into debt, and paying extra in interest for delays. You can make up a list of all your recurring monthly, quarterly, and yearly payments and create presets. This way, you will avoid entering the same data every time you need to make a payment. If you want to eliminate delays forever, set the rules within your banking app or another payments service to make a payment automatically on a set date.
Automatic payments are applied to all kinds of recurring business transactions, including:
- office rent
- employee salaries
- holiday employee bonuses
- fixed IRS payments (if you have any)
- office utility bills
- vehicle rent
- mortgages
- flight credit cards
- meal delivery
- insurance
- other essential services
Although full automation of these types of payments may seem like a good chance to forget about them, it’s actually not. You still have to supervise your accounts to ensure the system doesn’t fail. You should also keep an eye on your insurance premiums, tariff changes across different services, etc.
Use Business Credit Cards
All authoritative banks worldwide offer a wide range of credit cards for business purposes. The purpose of having one for your business and a bunch for your employees is to obtain more control over spendings and receive the benefits that an average credit card cannot provide. These may include:
- Discounts and extra mileage for flights – if your business involves frequent flights, such a card will let you travel more for less and reduce the cost of regular business trips. If we equate regular flights to recurring bills, this is a huge bonus;
- Enhanced credit/spending limits – you can spend more with business credit cards, and that’s a huge bonus when unexpected expenses occur and you need more funds to keep paying the bills and improve your business;
- Credit rating boost – making purchases, investments, and bill payments from a business credit card and returning withdrawals on time will provide you with a greater credit rating boost than average credit cards.
More Solutions to Consider
Other secure and convenient bill paying options for your business include:
- ACH–Credit – this option lets you make regular business payments through direct deposits and reduce the number of steps while making paying your bills, vendors, and taxes.
- Electronic Federal Tax Payment Services (EFTPS) – this online platform lets you schedule taxes and due payments and interact with the federal tax system directly. Not that it’s the friendliest way, but it’s always up to date and secure.
- Integrate invoice automation – automated invoice processing lets you approve and make payments on invoices automatically if you set specific processing rules.
Excel!
Always remember that every routine business process can be optimized to save you resources for more important operations. Regular payments are amongst the processes that must be optimized to let the company go without unnecessary interruptions, so implementing the best practices described above would change the game for you.