Streamline your accounts receivable using different payment methods and channels.

This episode is part of an ongoing video series demonstrating tips, tricks, and features to help you get the most out of Eagle Business Management Software. In today's video, Nathaniel dives into Integrated Receivables and how to provide your customers with powerful payment methods that will improve their experience and reduce your accounts receivable.

In the past two years, most businesses have reevaluated their accounts receivable processes. Many now prefer electronic ACH/EFT payments for transactions between trusted business partners. AutoPay is greatly streamlining the way business is done. 

This video covers - 

• Electronic Payment Processing
• Online Customer and Payment Portal
• Automated Communications
• AutoPay Setup and Communication

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Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of our EBMS insider series. This is a regular video series we do to demonstrate tips, tricks, highlight features, and provide other information to help you get the most out of your software. My name is Nathaniel Gingrich. I'm the Chief Product Officer of Eagle Business Software and in this episode we'll be talking about managing accounts receivable and payments. The features we'll be looking at are available in EBMS 8.4. Integrated receivables is a new buzzword in the business world, centered around how payment transactions are handled in the business to consumer and the business to business world. Today we're going to look at how EBMS can help you bring all the different payment types together. In the past year and a half many businesses have reevaluated how they handle their accounts receivable processes. Many are shifting to contactless methods of payment and moving it online, and even auto automating the payments. Why are they doing this? To decrease their AR balances, to increase efficiencies, and to optimize for a remote workforce. So what are the key ingredients that make up a good integrated receivables process? Well first of all you need to have a robust account receivable system. You need to have flexible customer terms. You need to be able to handle electronic payment processing and have an online customer portal where customers can go and make payments. And finally you need to have great automated communication. EBMS provides powerful solutions enabling this trend. So what's needed in a robust accounts receivable system? Well you need to be able to manage many different types of customer account; wholesale accounts, retail accounts, charge accounts, all with customer specific pricing, and you need to be able to manage many orders and leverage the power of batch processing. It's also important to have flexible terms, due dates, grace periods, discounts, finance charges, credit limits, and so much more. With the electronic payment processing you want to be able to integrate tightly with the accounts receivable system. Not only do you want to capture payment but you also want to be able to store card information or bank account information so that it can be used later. Customers today, both consumers and in the business to business world, are demanding access to online information where they can manage their account information, they can manage payment methods, they can see order status, and see purchase history, and they wish to of course go to that same portal and pay outstanding invoices and pay them through a wide variety of payment methods. But likely just as important is automated communication that gets to the right person at the right time with the right details so that they can have quick and effective access to the online information. One of the increasingly popular payment methods being used among business partners is auto pay. We'll go through the series of steps needed to set this up within EBMS. We'll go through and look at setting up customers with auto pay terms, and then we'll look at configuring autosend emails to go out, and finally we'll look at the online portal where invoice detail can be viewed and printed. There are two different ways to set up autopay within EBMS. The first is to pull the funds from the customer's account when you process the invoice. The second is to set up terms and pull the funds on the due date. In both of these scenarios you can use either credit card or ACH and debit their bank account with autosend. Numerous emails can be triggered as an order passes through different phases and once it's time to invoice it, an email can be sent that'll provide quick access to the online portal, so the customer can review the invoice and anticipate the payment occurring. Autosend emails can be formatted in powerful ways using HTML and CSS and you can incorporate placeholders that will personalize it and treat it as a form letter going out to your customer. Details and important information can be included in the body of the email. From the email the customer is able to quickly go to the online copy of the invoice. From there they can print it or even save it as a .pdf. So what's needed to set up EBMS as an integrated receivables solution? Well first of all there's some modules you'll need. The CRM module that has auto send and so much more in it, as well as of course electronic payment processing, the virtual terminal. These should all be a part of your EBMS community pack or added as a feature pack. You also need the EBMS Customer Portal. This is an e-commerce solution and comes as an essentials package, a select package, or premium package depending on what your needs may be. There are some other services that are needed as well like a business class email service or a merchant service provider to handle the credit card payment transactions. And finally if you want to accept ACH EFT, you need a bank that can handle and process those transactions. We'd be happy to sit down and discuss ways in which we can integrate and automate your receivables in order to help you gain efficiencies, decrease your accounts receivable balance, and optimize your workflow. Hey, thank you for watching. Visit info.egobusinesssoftware.com/support/insider to access all of the EBMS insider episodes. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to us and be sure to check back next month for another EBMS insider episode.