Bring Pain Relief To Your Merchants

One of the biggest challenges in the Payments/Accounting space is that businesses don’t always acknowledge their pain points; many will dismiss inconvenient processes as “it is what it is” because they don’t realize that solutions exist. This is where you can bring them an unexpected bit of pain relief!

The Forbes Business Development Council recently shared their advice on asking customers directly about their pain points. Below, we’ve adapted a few of our favorite conversation prompts and included some stats to help bolster your conversations.

“How much time do you spend on certain tasks, like collecting payments?”

42% of financial institutions cite that invoice reconciliation is the most prevalent issue for their B2B clients. This means that these businesses are doing well otherwise – and getting paid! – but actually getting that information back into their accounting software is a chore. And what tends to happen is that unpleasant chores be held off until it is absolutely necessary to do them. It is not unheard of for a business to reconcile their payments once a week or even once a month, simply because the reconciliation process is painful and slow.

Even if a business owner is fortunate enough to have some help, it often comes in the form of an Accounting Clerk who wears multiple hats. Tasks like collecting and reconciling payments are typical for an Accounting Clerk. However, when we took a look at Indeed.com job listings for Accounting Clerks, we found that the average job listing included 21 duties in addition to A/R responsibilities. Depending on the business, these may vary from additional accounting responsibilities including Payroll, Taxes, Incentive Compensation, etc. as well as a myriad of clerical and administrative tasks (data entry, scanning, and filing documents, etc.). 

This may make the payment reconciliation process somewhat harder to calculate outright, but if you can spark the conversation it may be an area where your merchant can save time – and money – by embracing automation to reduce time and errors. Best of all, by simplifying the payment collection process, businesses can focus their efforts in places where it's needed most and re-prioritize the duties of their staff.

“What do you need to stop doing?”

Business owners can typically give you a detailed list of what they wish they were doing. They want to focus on strategy, growth, development, expansion – but instead often get stuck spending a lot of time focusing on their accounting. The average small business owner works 53 hours per week, and for some entrepreneurs that number could be as high as 90 hours per week. When given a choice, most business owners would prefer to hand over the responsibility of accounting to someone more qualified.

In small businesses, it’s a common theme that business owners are involved in every area of their business. It’s also a common theme that the one place they wish they could step back from Accounting, which makes sense. Nobody ever set out to invent the world’s best thingamajig only to spend hours every day wrestling with QuickBooks entries. Chargezoom can help these business owners to launch and scale faster, without all of the manual work.

“What keeps you up at night?”

You won’t be surprised to know that “money” is what keeps most business owners awake at night. And while you don’t have a magic wand to wave and solve every problem, there are certainly some things that you can help these businesses address. 47% of small businesses struggle with predicting when their customers will pay, which makes cash flow forecasting difficult and leads to frustration. With Chargezoom, you can give them the option to create recurring payments (or subscriptions) for their services that allow them to collect payment on a precise date. This saves hassle on all sides; the client doesn’t need to worry about sending payment and the business owner can more accurately predict their income.

4 in 10 businesses say that late payments are preventing their company from growing. Which isn’t surprising. Without predictable cash flow, businesses cannot plan their growth trajectory. Collections isn’t usually anyone’s favorite task, but with Chargezoom the collections process can become a smaller part of anyone’s day. We offer tools like our Customer Portal that allows customers to pay all of their open invoices in a single click, recurring payments that remove the need to chase outstanding invoices, as well as tools that help you build your Collections Strategy. 

“What’s the most sluggish part of your (payment) process?”

The past few years have brought a lot of challenges to small businesses, including slower payments from their customers. 6 in 10 businesses worry about the rise in late payments. While there may be economic reasons why payments are delayed, the most common reasons remain that the invoice was not received or arrived with inaccurate or missing information. As more and more SMBs adopt automation for their payables, it’s important to ensure that invoices are accurate and reaching the right people. Chargezoom can help create invoices that perform and has provided 5 tips to get invoices paid faster.

While you might not be able to solve every problem that a small business owner has, there are many pain points that circle back squarely to billing and payments. This is where we can help them together, with better tools and services to keep their cash flowing seamlessly. And hopefully, they can get some rest at night.