A robust cashflow is essential to the success of any small business. Regardless of whether you own a café, produce craftwork, or run a guest house, you’ll often be at the mercy of cashflow successes and failures. Indeed, The Australian Securities and Investment Commission has stated that poor cashflow is cited as a factor in 40 per cent of cases where small businesses fail to thrive.*
Whilst being paid on time is a key factor to thriving, it’s not always under your control. However, setting yourself up for success by paying your own bills on time efficiently is something you can control. It is just as crucial to ensuring smooth cashflow and business longevity.
Processing payables can be both costly and time-consuming, so spending excessive amounts of time on this should be avoided at all costs. It’s important to put practices in place and leverage the technology available so that, as a small-business owner, you can spend more time working on your core business.
Having the available capital to handle day-to-day business issues, or the balancing-act of many due invoices, are common causes of stress for many small-business owners – but they don’t have to be. There are innovative technologies coming on to the market all the time that work to reduce manual processing and improve efficiencies.
Take advantage of online tools
Invoices can quickly accumulate, and the manual effort it takes to sort through these can distract business owners from their true focuses, such as customer service, or improving their product. Consider using accounting software that can organise your billing schedule, or even better, allow you to access this software from multiple devices – such as a laptop, or on-the-go on mobile devices.
Pay multiple bills at once
Paying multiple bills at once is a quick-fix solution to a familiar pain-point for small business owners, accountants, and accounts payable alike. BPAY BatchMaker, which recently launched on the QuickBooks app store, is an example of an easy and convenient way to capture invoice data, instantly validate BPAY payment information, and match invoices with existing suppliers.
A consolidated approach will also work at lowering overheads, because instead of manually processing individual bills, you can spend more time focusing on running your business.
Embracing a new world order
The reality is, the days of writing cheques or conducting invoicing on a case-by-case basis are fast disappearing. Businesses are becoming accustomed to tapping into the innovations available to streamline payments – and so too are their customers. In order to match your customers’ expectations in this digital world, it is important to be up-to-date on the latest payments technology trends.
Keith Brown, General Manager – Product, Scheme and Business Development, BPAY Group
