Over the past few years, one term has come to represent the drastic difference in the way businesses are operating: integrated payments. To summarize the current environment that has given rise to the integrated payments model, you need only look as far as eCommerce, which necessitates a business model where payments are nestled in among all the other various processes driving the business. For brick-and-mortars, too, it doesn’t take a wild imagination to see just how helpful integrating all the technologies that your business relies upon can be, and how payments, as the heartbeat of your organization, so to speak, is the ideal place around which to centralize all these processes. Let’s look at why integrated payments has such a powerful advantage over the traditional way of accepting credit card for small business.
Pen and paper management, to most, can hold back your company like a ball and chain around the ankle. This is because of just how much better it could be, and just how much technology has benefitted small- and medium-sized businesses through automating the routine tasks that amount to so many crucial man-hours. Particularly for SMBs, those man hours are practically invaluable, due to how much need- to be done to grow, and how few people there likely are to get it done.
The list of processes that can be simply integrated and automated continues to grow. It’s up to each business to determine the cost to benefit balance, and to determine just how much to move over to an integrated process.
One wide and expansive frontier in operations that opens up once a business transitions over to a more integrated payment structure is the Data. Back when the books were on pen and paper, it was virtually impossible to find out key data items, and the trends that were hidden—either that or, such as with inventory, it was such a time-consuming process. When you integrate various software solutions, which are able to do the number crunching for you, generating reports can be something close to automatic. That information is the best reward you can give yourself, as it enables you to take action, all over the processes of your business. Be more on top of that inventory. Automatically reorder products on a schedule that matches your consumption (no guessing required). The ecosystem of solutions for bookkeeping, scheduling, and more, can free you up to do so much more.
But wait—all this data becomes a reward for customers, too. With an integrated CRM, you can more easily keep track of interactions with your customers, which means, with the right platform and a little effort, you become able to cater to your customers’ needs and preferences better than ever before. You can customize special offers, cross-sell items that have a good chance of working for them, and ultimately, be a better person to your customers by paying attention to your relationship with them. That’s added value to the customer, and added value for you over the lifetime of your relationship.
If you are looking to upgrade your way of accepting credit card for small business, it makes good sense to look at the decision as a way to grow into the future. Moolah takes payments seriously, and love to see what integrations can do for businesses.