{"id":10318,"date":"2017-05-12T15:22:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T19:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/?p=10318"},"modified":"2025-08-14T08:49:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T12:49:09","slug":"the-time-drain-in-your-payment-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/the-time-drain-in-your-payment-process\/","title":{"rendered":"The time drain in your payment process"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMoney Matters<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tThe time drain in your payment process\t\t\t\t\t<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\t

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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\"\"\t\t\t\tBob Shawgo<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

You may be saying, \u201cNo time drain here. I\u2019ve streamlined my procure-to-pay process.\u201d Great. You\u2019re able to move from requisition to purchase order to bill without rekeying data, enable robust approvals with automated emails and mobile approvals, and set advanced filters to expedite select-to-pay tasks. What about the final step? What about printing checks, stuffing envelopes, and mailing payments? How many hoops do you jump through to set up ACH with banks? Do you still hand out corporate credit card numbers to vendors?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the first of three articles on the pains of making payments and what to do about them. With all our automation, payments by check, ACH, or credit card in most companies still pile up unnecessary busy work for finance teams. Each payment type taxes the time and talent of the accounting staff\u2014time that could be spent finding ways to grow or improve the organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speedbumps, detours, and roadblocks in checks, ACH, and credit cards<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Even with the trend to move away from checks, some vendors won\u2019t take any other form of payment. They insist a check in hand is most cost-effective for them, regardless of the time it costs you. So we write checks using our financial system\u2019s print-ready PDFs. And that\u2019s where most automation ends. You need to continually restock and reload printer ink. You need to order, receive, and track cases of check stock\u2014locking it away so no one misappropriates it. You need to retrieve check stock, prepare the printer, perform a test payment run, and correct misprints. And you need to stuff and mail all those checks. After sending checks, you pull transaction history from business bank records or retrieve check images from to reconcile issues. At each step you incur busy work\u2014often performed by or under the supervision of highly-trained accounting staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ACH payments seem to offer something less labor intensive\u2014that is until you spend time setting up ACH with your banks, providing those very specific NACHA files. While filling out and filing multiple forms so you can spend money drains time on the front end, you still have reconciliation. Talk about burning the candle at both ends. And if you or your vendor change banks, you get to perform the setup and wait on the banks all over again. ACH heads in the right direction, but it could be better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paying with a credit card looks ideal until you start dealing with the avalanche of what-if and what-now issues. You give the card number to the vendor, and they charge your account. Simple, right? It is until you\u2019re scouring credit card statements to make sure they align with the bills you paid. And when you catch an incorrect payment, you get to make several phone calls to the credit card company, with their classy on-hold music, to get the charge corrected. When the card expires or gets reissued, you get to contact all those repeat vendors and update the card information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whichever method you use, paying bills burns up a resource growing ever more precious to your business\u2014time. Don\u2019t let making payments become a bottleneck at the end of your beautifully automated procure-to-pay system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cexpress\u201d lane for paying bills<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Sage Intacct and American Express envisioned a better way to pay bills when they partnered to build Vendor Payment Services\u2014a package of payment offerings within Sage Intacct that take the busy work out of paying your bills. They built each payment service\u2014Sage Intacct Check Delivery, American Express ACH, or American Express Corporate Card\u2014right into Sage Intacct\u2019s current payment workflow. You just select bills to pay and choose the method you want to use. Sage Intacct and American Express take it from there, while your accounting staff goes back to growing and improving your organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With check delivery, American Express writes and mails the checks. Because checks are drawn on your existing banks accounts, you still have the same bank reconciliation procedures\u2014also automated in Sage Intacct. And of course, because Sage Intacct is flexible, you can still manually create a check whenever you need to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With ACH, you share bank account information once with American Express during setup, and they take care of setting up ACH to pay from your various banks. When an ACH payment goes through, American Express posts it to your financials\u2014saving you the time of manually verifying your ACH payments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Corporate card payments eliminate handing out or updating your corporate card numbers. When you make a payment, American Express issues a one-time-use number to the vendor and posts successful payments back to your financials. Sage Intacct and American Express even automate setup by identifying which of your vendors take American Express.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stop draining the precious resource of time from you accounting staff and let them get busy making the organization run better and grow faster. Learn more about Vendor Payment Services<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Get our latest business advice delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\"Working\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may be saying, \u201cNo time drain here. I\u2019ve streamlined my procure-to-pay process.\u201d Great. You\u2019re able to move from requisition to purchase order to bill without rekeying data, enable robust approvals with automated emails and mobile approvals, and set advanced filters to expedite select-to-pay tasks. What about the final step? What about printing checks, stuffing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1212,"featured_media":9251,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sage_video":false,"post_featured_image_hide":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,48,49],"tags":[420,168],"business_type":[312,41],"lilypad":[],"context":[418,429],"industry":[57,58,55,450,454],"persona":[99,98],"imagine_tag":[209,436],"coauthors":[624],"class_list":["post-10318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-money-matters","category-technology-innovation","category-trends-insights","tag-cloud-financial-management","tag-sage-accounting","business_type-accountants","business_type-growing-business","industry-financial-services","industry-nonprofit","industry-professional-services","industry-software-saas","industry-wholesale-distribution"],"sage_meta":{"region":"en-us","author_name":"Bob Shawgo","featured_image":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/04\/GettyImages-1327494174.jpg","imagine_tags":{"209":"Accounting","436":"Intacct Accounting"}},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"Sage Advice US","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/1212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/9251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"business_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/business_type?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"lilypad","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/lilypad?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"context","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/context?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"persona","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/persona?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"imagine_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/imagine_tag?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/api\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}