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Proper invoicing can make or break a business, especially in verticals like professional services, medical services, B2B sales and others who rely on invoicing for the bulk of their payments. That’s why seamless, digital invoicing solutions that minimize errors,  speed up processing and seamlessly reconcile are so crucial.

Today, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) are straying away from manually preparing bills and mailing papers in favor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like QuickBooks and Xero. ERPs do a lot of things extremely well, which is why the most popular ones are so widely in use. But, a lot of merchants find the payment solutions built into these systems lacking. 

For starters, transactions processed through an ERP are more expensive. Since invoicing and payments are tied to (and limited by) the built-in technology, they can be clunky and add unnecessary friction. Unfortunately, because they use the systems for so many key accounting and financial tasks, a lot of merchants feel locked in to their ERP’s payments. But, they don’t have to be.

Through new payment integrations, merchants can now enjoy all the operational benefits of a top ERP while also tapping into the lower rates, better support and more streamlined flows of traditional payments solutions. For providers like independent sales organizations (ISOs) and payment facilitators (PayFacs), that means a whole new way to serve a previously walled-off pool of customers and a huge opportunity to expand and grow into new verticals.

The Problem: Dealing With High Fees and Extra Friction

Most SMBs doing heavy invoicing depend on tools built directly into their ERP systems, like QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop and Xero. Although these are powerful systems, they’re primarily designed for accounting functions, and the companies that make them are not payments specialists. That secondary nature means that, when it comes to payments, ERPs have some major drawbacks that merchants often just accept as unavoidable.

Native Payments Through Platforms Like QuickBooks and Xero Are Expensive

Processing an invoice payment directly through an ERP normally engages the platform’s back-end payment processing service. For example, an invoice processed through QuickBooks is routed through Intuit Payments. While these built-in processing channels do a fine job at getting an invoice payment from point A to point B, they often charge much higher fees than traditional payment processors. Standard rates are often as high as 2.99% — even more in certain cases. That puts ERP payments into the same fee territory as large platforms like Stripe and PayPal. As a result, many merchants are paying much higher transaction fees on their invoice payments than they should.

Using ERP Payment Tools Requires a Separate Channel 

Processing invoice payments through an ERP like QuickBooks or Xero creates a distinct, siloed payment flow that only applies to invoices. For some merchants, that’s not a big deal. But, for merchants who use both invoicing and traditional card payments in-store or online, having two distinct payment flows can cause unnecessary friction; it means juggling two different vendors, two different statements, two different support channels, two sets of data to reconcile and so on. Ultimately, it means more headaches.

The Opportunity: Tap Into More Business With Better, Cheaper ERP Invoicing

If you’re a traditional frontline payments company, like an ISO or PayFac, the problems associated with invoicing through ERPs represent a big opportunity. Heavy invoicers don’t want to move away from platforms like QuickBooks and Xero because they do so many things well. But, what if you could plug traditional payments into those ERPs, letting merchants keep their preferred software while lowering their transaction fees and making their lives simpler?

Turning Invoicing and Traditional Card Payments Into a Single Stream Opens Up New Competitive Opportunities

Marrying invoicing and traditional payments into a single channel lets you expand into lucrative new verticals. Many heavy invoicers who depend on ERP platforms have traditionally been closed off from working with payment companies outside of their ERP ecosystem. But, enabling them to stay within that familiar, comfortable world while also getting better, more affordable payment services suddenly interests previously resistant merchants. That makes invoicing a potentially powerful way for you to expand your operations and grow at a time when the payments space is more competitive than ever.

Bringing Invoice Payments Under Your Umbrella Earns You New Revenue and Saves Your Merchants Money

In addition to branching out into new vertices, breaking into ERP payments allows you to into previously inaccessible income from existing clients. If you have merchants who take traditional card payments and also do a portion of their business through invoicing, you’ve probably been losing out on that processing volume to QuickBooks, Xero or other accounting platforms. With the right invoicing integration, you can capture those lost transactions while simultaneously reducing your merchants’ overall fees — a massive win-win that makes you more money and positions you as a more valuable partner.

Capturing ERP Invoicing Payments the Easy Way

How do you bridge the gap between the payment products you’re currency selling and invoice payments through popular platforms like QuickBooks and Xero? The key is integrating a new invoicing and payments system directly into the merchant’s ERP installation. This ensures that nothing really changes for the users, but the invoices and payments are routed through your system and payment gateway, instead of the ones natively built into the ERP.

That might sound high-tech and difficult (and it probably would be if you had to do it all yourself), but, luckily, there are tools designed to make this kind of invoicing integration a nearly frictionless plug-and-play experience.

Bill Connect: The Newest, Easiest Way to Expand Into QuickBooks and Xero Payments With NMI

Bill Connect is NMI’s new invoicing integration that enables you to quickly, easily and securely insert our best-in-class payments directly into a merchant’s QuickBooks or Xero installation.

For the merchant, nothing changes about how they use the ERP they’re already familiar with, except that their invoices will work and look even better. Everything still flows through their ERP of choice and reconciles back to it. On the back end, the invoices leave the system through Bill Connect, and payments seamlessly return through the NMI gateway.

The merchant gets to keep the ERP system they already know and depend on while unlocking the lower fees and streamlined service that come with getting all their payments from a single partner — you.

For ISOs and PayFacs, adopting Bill Connect is even easier. You can sell it through NMI Marketplace Apps just like all of our other gateway extensions, which means the service itself generates a small monthly profit for you, rather than a cost. All you have to do is recruit the merchants, and we do the rest. 

Once a merchant installs Bill Connect and authorizes the integration, everything is ready to go. There is no easier way for you to gain access to the huge number of transactions currently flowing through top ERPs every single day.

Bill Connect can help you expand into new verticals and unlock latent revenue by improving ERP-based invoicing. To find out more, reach out to a member of our team today.

Don’t just turn on payments, transform the way you do business

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