In the B2B environment, ensuring timely payments for credit sales is one of the most challenging practices. Especially when goods have been delivered and payments haven’t been received and the due date is near, the chances of invoice overdue increases. This not only affects your accounts receivable (AR) collections, but also impedes your routine business operations including manufacturing, paying vendors, payroll and other disbursements that help smooth flow of operations. The customer payment portal is a powerful tool that can streamline your collections while facilitating your customers to pay invoices electronically, saving you time and effort collecting payments. This blog explores the importance of a customer payment portal in collecting wholesale supply order payments to unlock a business’ cash flow. It discusses the features of the tool that make it a game-changer for wholesalers in the B2B space to collect customer payments.
Customer Payment Portal and Its Usefulness
It is a secure website or an application that enables the company’s customers to access various self-service functions. Those may include seamless communication with customers, creating and submitting tickets to resolve issues, seeing the history of payments, and the list of invoices to make payments. One crucial part of this portal is allowing customers to make electronic payments securely. It requires filling in certain details, adding payment methods, and selecting invoices to pay. While customers can pay invoices in a few clicks, businesses can collect those quickly.
A customer portal is a useful tool, often used in e-commerce that allows customers to make online payments. In the B2B space for wholesalers, this tool is a payment gateway for customers to make payments against merchant invoices for delivered goods. This tool speeds up the invoice-to-cash process for wholesalers because invoices and collections are streamlined. Additionally, this tool enables customers and businesses to track payments, check the payment status, and communicate on the portal to resolve customer’s payment disputes.
Working on the Customer Payment Portal
The payment portal is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application integrated with the banking system to process payments. Each payment portal provider employs a different payment gateway, determining the number of payment options and methods it provides. Following are the common steps in the working of the payment portal.
- The customer accesses the portal and fills in the payment details to pay the invoice.
- The data will be encrypted on the web browser and sent to the merchant’s web server.
- The data from the merchant is sent to the acquiring bank to verify the card affiliation.
- The bank either approves the transaction or declines it, which is then notified on the portal.
- If approved, the issuing bank will process the payment to complete the transaction.
Benefits of Payment Portals for Your Customers of the Wholesale Business
While a payment portal facilitates customers to pay securely, the two most common benefits make it a useful B2B tool.
1. Greater Control over Payments
Customers can pay their merchants or wholesalers through a platform without worrying about the hidden charges. Once a customer has added a payment method, they only need to click the pay now button to make a payment. This makes it easier for customers to pay, which is otherwise required to calculate the amounts, and taxes, and mail checks or email receipts of payments to the wholesaler. This self-service portal offers greater control over payments, where customers can enable auto-pay to pay invoices as soon as they are due.
2. Higher Visibility of Invoices
Manual paper-based invoices are difficult to track and are prone to errors. It necessitates many human hours and data gathering, which makes it time-consuming for customers to pay. On the other hand, the payment portal allows customers to pay on the secure portal while allowing customers to check payment history, upcoming invoices, and other statistics without taking much time.
3. Payments Made Simple and Effortless
The payment portal gives customers the freedom to pay invoices whenever convenient, without being restricted by the bank’s operating hours. With its 24/7 availability, buyers can maintain their accounts to pay invoices on time, saving them from potential penalties.
Benefits of Payment Portals for Wholesale Businesses
The customer payment portal benefits wholesale businesses in several ways. Not only does this improve your cash flow, but it also has other benefits presented below.
1. Efficient Collections with Fewer Resources
One of the most significant benefits of a customer portal is that it provides automation in AR collection process, requiring fewer resources to intervene. From the wholesaler’s end, the invoices are sent to the customers after supplying the products, which can often be embedded with a click-to-pay option. This makes it easier for customers to pay with a click since customers have already saved the payment details on the portal.
2. Unlock Cash Flow by Getting Paid Faster
No business wants to get paid slower. With a customer portal, you can empower customers to pay quickly and effortlessly. This settles the debt and improves your AR collections. Convenience is a leading driver, and with the portal, you can adopt digital methods, saving your AR team from manually collecting checks and reconciling statements because when integrated with your accounting software or ERP, you can streamline the reconciliation process.
3. Gain Insights and Analytics for Decision-making
Detecting sales trends and customer’s payment pattern is easier with the payment portal because it records data and provides data visualization. This equips wholesalers with the insights you can utilize to forecast your cash flow and potential issues in the collection process and make strategic financial decisions. In addition, this reduces the company’s forecasting efforts as data, insights, and analytics are accurately created that managers and executives can access to consider for decision-making.
4. Keep Invoices on Top of Customer’s Minds
With payment portals, businesses can schedule payment reminders and dunning messages for their customers, keeping invoices on top of their minds. This reduces the communication gap without involving human resources to call and remind customers to pay. Not only does this save time, but it reduces the operational cost associated with the invoicing and collection process.
5. Higher Security Standards
Hackers often target online banking transactions as it involves money. However, this is not the case with payment portal platforms because they have been integrated with PCI compliance, which makes the transaction and customer data secure. On the other hand, the portal is authorized access to AR teams only, restricting unauthorized access. This makes the platform secure for businesses and customers.
The Bottom Line
A payment portal is a crucial tool in today’s B2B landscape, which makes it easier for customers to make payments while allowing wholesalers to secure their financial future and effortlessly collecting accounts receivables. Payment portals have many benefits for both wholesale businesses and customers in terms of efficiency, reduction in errors, and lower manual efforts. Using a payment portal reduces the operational costs for wholesalers so they can pay for supplies to manufacture and running their operations, freeing their resources and equipping them with insights and data to forecast cash flow and make well-informed strategic decisions.
