How to Solve Your Merchant’s Most Pressing Invoicing Problems

The Business Problem

The Bill Connect Premium Solution

At the end of every month, your merchants have to reconcile their payments, making sure all expected deposits hit the bank and the books all match. But two things make that a nightmare. 

The first is batching – the lumping of multiple transactions that happens in payment processing. This increases opacity and makes figuring out which deposits match which payments a massive headache. 

The second is software incompatibility. Merchants have to log into their bank portal, accounting software and payment processors separately and then juggle data back and forth across all three. 

Bill Connect Premium offers fully automated batch reconciliation on all payments that flow through the system. It creates a frictionless, unified connection between the merchant’s bank, accounting software and payment processor, and instantly matches bank deposits with payments.

By automatically reconciling deposits in popular tools like QuickBooks and Xero, Bill Connect Premium turns reconciliation from something merchants dread to something they don’t need to think about. The time savings in this one area alone is often enough to generate positive ROI on the premium upgrade. 

Awkward and disjointed follow-up efforts

Sometimes payments are late. That’s just reality. But cash flow mismanagement is one of the top top challenges contributing to small business failure. In the US, over half of SMBs are owed late payments of $17,500 on average, and in the UK, 14,000 merchants go out of business each year due directly to late payments.

Unfortunately, accounts receivable is also one of the most hated jobs any SMB has to do. Merchants often struggle with deciding when a follow-up is appropriate, and worries about damaging business relationships can cause real anxiety. And that’s if merchants even remember to follow-up while juggling dozens of plates in daily operations. 

Bill Connect Premium offers fully automated follow-ups, not only by email, but by paper mail, too. Merchants just set the rules for how late a payment can get before a reminder goes out, and the system does the rest. It can even apply rules-based late fees automatically.  

With Bill Connect Premium, busy merchants don’t need to keep track of delinquencies, and the anxiety over when and how to ask for the money again is eliminated. That makes accounts receivable a consistent, automated and easy process. 

Under-optimized customer payment journeys

Better billing can improve the payment experience for end customers, but if regular customers have to manually submit a payment every time they receive an invoice, friction builds up fast across multiple purchases. 

Deeper automation removes that friction, reduces the customer’s workload and eliminates the chance of a late payment due to innocent forgetfulness. That’s a win-win merchants need from their billing tools. 

For buyers making multiple regular orders, Bulk Pay allows merchants to process all outstanding invoices in bulk, saving customers from submitting potentially dozens of individual payments manually.  

Bill Connect Premium goes beyond the embedded pay-now button and makes paying nearly invisible for end customers.

Customers can easily set up recurring payments using a securely stored card on file and Bill Connect Premium’s built-in customer portal. 

Autopay charges invoices automatically on the due date, so customers never have to remember a payment again. Stored payment methods let customers save a card or bank account once and reuse it on every future invoice. 

The branded customer portal, skinned in the merchant’s logo and colors, gives customers 24/7 self-service access to view invoices, manage stored cards and control their autopay settings without ever leaving the merchant’s brand experience. 

Loss of branding opportunities

Trust is at the center of every business relationship, and when it comes to paying, any third-party branding that gets between the customer and the merchant has the potential to cause confusion and erode trust. 

Two moments matter most: the email the invoice arrives from and the page the customer lands on to pay. If either feels like it belongs to someone other than the merchant, mindshare and trust both take a hit.

Bill Connect Premium fully white-labels the invoicing and payment process so customers only interact with the merchant’s branding. That ensures complete customer comfort and creates maximum brand awareness for the merchant. 

When an invoice arrives, it’s from the merchant’s email domain and on the merchant’s letterhead. Then, when the customer clicks through to pay, the Bill Connect Premium customer portal is skinned with the merchant’s colors and logo.