How to Pay Your Bills Using Online Payment Methods in a Smart Way

Optimizing every node of your business financial system is a must. Since bills are a massive part of your monthly expenses and mean much to your business sustainability, you want to make billing less time-consuming. 

Fortunately, various platforms already implement intelligent billing and include a set of tricks to save time and company funds. Let’s take a closer look at the topic with billing experts. 

1. How to Make an Online Payment

Electronic payments through online payment methods are a lot easier than it may seem, regardless of the payment purposes:

• Open an online banking account – If you already have a business bank account, you can already verify your online banking account. So it’s already a secure option to make electronic payments, including automatic recurring payments. 

Depending on your bank, you may receive particular benefits for using online payment methods such as online banking for business. 

• Use a billing system – It is one of the most popular online payment methods. You can make electronic payments via a platform designed specifically for business purposes and integrate various solutions into your company’s CRM, which is much more convenient than online banking solutions. 

Especially if you have to deal with a large number of monthly transactions. 

• Pay with business credit cards – A good credit score is significant for any business, so it is recommended to make regular payments with a business credit card and close the debt on time to boost your business credit score. 

Knowing how to pay your credit bill on time is also essential, especially when considering personal loans. It will significantly help you when spending a lot on specific improvements or renovations. That’s usually impossible without a substantial loan, so you should prepare an opportunity for your company in advance.

• Make sure your connection is secure – Online payment methods that happen through any public network are a big “no.” If there’s no way to avoid payments on the go, they must be done via cellular Internet. 

When using various online payment methods on your computer, ensure the website is protected with an HTTPS protocol (a lock icon near the link). Otherwise, your personal information (credit card numbers, passwords, etc.) can be stolen. 

• Use Electronic Federal Tax Payment Services (EFTPS) – EFTPS provides new federal tax forms for any purpose and lets you exchange information and money with the IRS or another responsible organization in your country. 

2. Tips to Pay Your Bills Effectively

Regardless of the online payment methods you choose to process your bills; you should remember these essential tips to make things the right way:

• Schedule your payments – it’s highly recommended to schedule all electronic payments through online payment methods three days before they are due. This way, you will ensure that you choose the correct payment date if there are weekends or holidays. 

Although most online payment methods can be made on any day if the payment is recurring and automated, you still have to consider this for expenses that can be made only during official working days.

• Set reminders – this point goes right after scheduling payments and lets you ensure that you don’t forget to make a payment and don’t get a late payment fee. 

It’s recommended to set reminders even for automated online payment methods as automation requires supervision to exclude system failure and change the payment amount in time if needed. 

• Verify payments – even if a payment is automated, you must ensure it’s done and reflect that fact in your CRM. Using intelligent, mechanical online payment methods, you can integrate them into your CRM and have all the data entered automatically. 

3. Online Payment Methods Are Processed Faster

Online payment methods are usually instant or take less time than physical payments. 

While there’s no way to pay for online services with cash without going out to find the nearest terminal and paying a huge commission, making electronic payments from a smartphone or computer doesn’t tie you to a specific location. 

Considering payments to federal organizations, such as the IRS, you can make your payments reach these organizations a lot faster and receive error notifications earlier. That is extremely important for taxes because mailing the IRS and getting a reply by mail can take weeks, while e-mail replies and notifications are delivered immediately. This applies to any tax organization worldwide. 

4. Benefit from Using Specialized Billing Systems

Although modern online payment methods provided by banks are pretty good, they don’t provide the needed level of flexibility for business entities. 

Registering your company on a trusted, intelligent billing platform can streamline most of your transactions and secure the entire system through CRM API integration. The benefits of integrating such a solution include:

• Fraud protection – billing fraud schemes aim to steal cash from organizations by submitting fraudulent invoices. 

Although such schemes are very costly, they are ubiquitous and may attack your company anytime. That’s where an intelligent integrated billing solution that allows online payment methods will help you identify fraudulent activities before they go too far. 

• Assistance with documentation – having a convenient and secure cloud-based solution with all your business documentation stored is an excellent way to save time. You can have all your documentation stored on a billing platform, which will automatically provide your bank(s) with the needed documentation, depending on the current purpose. 

• Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry (VMPI) against chargebacks – chargeback is another common way for fraudsters to steal goods and money from organizations. It would help if you integrated VMPI to halt all the unrecognized purchases and close disputes that are not necessary. 

An automatic alerting system will help you with that.

• Payment automation – it’s much easier to deal with recurring business payments if you let the automation do the routine work for you. Billing systems allow you to create automation for all payments in one place to simplify regular transactions. 

5. Automate Payments for Good

All organizations have a list of recurring payments, meaning any company can automate them to save time. 

You can set automation rules for any method of payments in any online banking application and electronic payment processing service and ensure that all your fixed monthly, quarterly, and yearly payments are made in time. 

This option works well for mortgage payments, online and offline software bundle subscriptions, insurance premiums, salaries, fixed, regular investments, and any other payments that must be done in the same amount and at the same time regularly. 

If your business deals with regular invoices, you can process them automatically. The entire route from receiving an invoice to approving a payment can be automated if you set the rules in your invoice processing software or online platform. 

6. Is It Safe Enough to Pay Bills Online?

Digital payment companies, online banks and effective online payment methods all use robust encryption protocols in their payment software, such as AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) protocols (AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256), and other high-end user data protection technologies and so, have pretty secure payment systems. 

Although the AES encryption method is already unbreakable, user data theft remains a common problem. However, it’s essential to understand that users are guilty of that in most cases. 

All due to various phishing scams. They involve malicious parties that pretend to be popular banks and payment service providers and try to obtain users’ info to break into their accounts and steal the money. Everyone who has access to your company’s finance must know all the possible scam types to be ready to face them and resist. 

Apart from relying on the secure payment systems of digital payment companies, it’s also highly recommended to do the following to enhance the security of your accounts:

• Don’t click any links from financial organizations unless you are 100% sure they come from authorized parties.

• Don’t share personal and sensitive business information with anyone online or on the phone unless you use protected channels.

• Always use two-factor authentication to prevent malicious parties from getting into your accounts, even if they have a login and a correct password. It’s currently the best way to eliminate such a chance. The feature is available for all current services that have any method of payment of any sort.

• Use only a secure connection to avoid data interception. Unfortunately, most public WiFi hotspots you find in hotels, cafes, and airports are not protected from hacking. The bigger the place, the higher the chances it has some undetectable data theft program running on particular routers or even entire servers. 

No More Papers?

By implementing an intelligent approach to online payment methods, you can streamline all of your company’s transactions and reduce the number of resources needed for electronic payment processing. Your biggest target should be using payment software that uses automation as it’s not expensive anymore and can be set without any special knowledge. 

You need to integrate reliable services into your organization’s financial system and let it do the job. Don’t forget about safety and keep up with the latest information to improve your system and request the latest technology of online payment methods available on the market. 

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