What Is an Integrated Payment System and Why Your Business Needs It

Providing a brilliant customer experience is among the top goals of businesses worldwide. Achieving it brings plenty of benefits, from increased brand awareness to boosted revenues.

One of the many components that merchants implement to ensure a frictionless shopping process for their customers is integrated payments. Find out what this solution implies and learn how to introduce it into your business operations in this comprehensive guide.

Integrated Payment System Definition

An integrated payment solution ensures a seamless connection between the tools responsible for facilitating financial transactions and other critical elements of a business system, such as:

• Sales data analytics
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Creation of invoices
• Inventory management
• Accounting

In other words, integrated payment systems perform functions beyond standard debit and credit card processing, enabling to streamline business operations. Read ahead to find out how exactly these software solutions work.

How Integrated Payments Work

To understand how integrated payment systems work, it’s best to compare transaction processing with and without this solution.

Here’s how businesses accept credit card purchases without an integrated payment system:

1. A client decides to contact a business and place an order through the phone or website.
2. The employees have to enter the customer’s credit card number into a payment terminal.
3. The staff members have to save the purchase receipts, print out invoices, and staple those two papers together every time the business software receives an order.
4. When payments are received, the workers match paper invoices to their electronic versions and update the transaction data.
5. Without integrated payment systems, merchants adjust their accounts receivable and general ledger manually to reflect the transaction.

As you can see, the processing of transactions without integrated payment solutions requires merchants to invest a lot of resources.

In contrast, here’s what the same process looks like with an integrated payment system:

1. A client decides to contact a business and place an order by phone, online, in person, or via a mobile device.
2. The employee enters the credit card number directly into the accounting software.
3. The remaining transaction processing steps are performed by the integrated payment solution.

Integrated payment solutions mark invoices as paid automatically and send the transaction data to your accounts receivable and general ledger - simple as that!

10 Benefits of Integrated Payment Solutions for Businesses

Based on the information mentioned above, it’s already easy to suppose that integrated payment solutions provide a plethora of benefits for businesses.

Let’s take a closer look at their main advantages for merchants:

1. Centralizing Business Processes

Integrated payment solutions enable merchants to accept payments and consolidate important data more efficiently due to synchronizing the operations of essential business processes.

2. Saving Time Resources

Payment processing, accounting, and dealing with invoices can get extremely time-consuming, especially as the business grows along with the number of customers. That’s why merchants typically can’t rely on manual financial management and need the help of integrated payment systems.

With the help of integrated payments, businesses are relieved from inputting credit card data into accounting software every time they need to process a transaction. Instead, batch information is entered into the ERP system or business accounting software nearly instantly.

3. Reducing the Possibility of Human Error

Businesses can experience human errors when they key payment data into their ERP or accounting software manually. Payments based on wrong information can result in a client being charged from the wrong account or other similar issues.

Integrated payment systems are more reliable partners than even the most attentive employees. Besides, such accounting and finance management software frees people from performing tedious and monotonous work and enables them to focus on more important tasks.

4. Increasing the Cash Flow

Automating accounting, data entry, and other payments-related operations enables businesses to process a lot more transactions with increased efficiency. Thus, integrated payments contribute to increasing the revenue flow for businesses.

5. Ensuring Payment Security and PCI Compliance

Manual accounting is not only a tedious task but also one that is vulnerable to many security risks. With an integrated payment system, merchants can process global transactions with a cloud-based payment gateway.

Using such software lets businesses implement cloud-based accounting, which is a significantly better way of managing payments in terms of security compared to its manual counterpart. It also enables merchants to access data from anywhere as long as the internet network is available.

Another major advantage of cloud-based accounting software for businesses is that it is often compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This ensures that the customers’ sensitive credit card information is protected from a data breach with multiple security levels.

6. Providing Cost-Effective Software

Introducing integrated payments to businesses operations is a cost-effective solution for a number of reasons:

• Due to minimizing the occurrence of human errors when processing payments, merchants have to spend less time and money fixing mistakes.
• An integrated payment system performs many tasks instead of the employees, from data entry to accounting services, which means that a business would require fewer employees to get the job done.
• A payment processing system that handles transactions efficiently is likely to drive sales due to a higher satisfaction rate from the customers.
• A single software solution that links business operations into one ecosystem is cheaper to maintain than multiple scattered programs and services.

7. Simplifying Accounting

Manual accounting is a challenging task that requires businesses to handle paper ledgers and invoices. This makes data entry mistakes nearly unavoidable. Besides, it takes time to spot such errors and money to fix them.

With integrated payments software, merchants don’t have to perform accounting and data entry relying on human labor. Payments are registered directly in the accounting software and are applied to the general ledger or credited to invoices.

Besides, accounting records registered on paper are more vulnerable to theft and often don’t have backup copies.

8. Enabling Business Scaling

An integrated payment solution provides a business with the technology it needs to scale and evolve its operations over time. Such software supplied to merchants by reliable service providers will ensure efficient and frictionless payment data processing even as the number of operations and invoices increases.

9. Allowing Payment Processing Customization

One more advantage of an integrated payments solution is that it is customizable. Thus, such systems can be enriched with features matching business needs and client expectations, and can also be adjusted at any point.

Here are some examples:

• Integrated payments can be set up to match a CRM system and provide client behavior analysis based on data collected over time.
• Such a software solution can be tailored to provide insights in the marketing and accounting spheres and help improve the quality of services provided to the customers.
• The integrated payment system can optimize business-specific accounting processes, track inventory, sales, and deliveries, as well as help issue custom invoices.

10. Boosting Customer Service

Keeping customers in line can cost US retail businesses approximately $100 billion per year, with clients not willing to enter stores or buy anything there if the waiting time seems too long.

Integrated payments have the power to enhance a point-of-sale system by optimizing the available functionalities and adding extra capabilities. Thus, such a software solution helps to significantly speed up the processing of payments compared to the time required to facilitate a transaction manually.

Integrated payments can also come in the form of modern businesses’ trusted partners like self-checkout, mobile checkout, and online checkout that automate a big share of transactions.

How to Find a Reliable Integrated Payment System

Now that you know about the benefits of integrated payment systems, you are likely to see the potential they have in optimizing transaction processing for your business. The good news is that nowadays there are plenty of options offering integrated payments to global businesses.

To find a reliable partner that will provide you with such services, you have to pay attention to the following features:

• Security. The security of the customers’ sensitive credit card data is of utmost importance when it comes to processing global payments. Besides, PCI DSS compliance is essential to ensure decent protection. Thus, when choosing an integrated system, pay attention to the solutions that can be paired with a PCI DSS-friendly cloud-based payment gateway.
• Client reviews. Positive reviews coming from customers on a global scale contribute to the integrated payment partner’s trustworthiness.
• Simplicity of use. The solutions that offer integrated payments have the ultimate goal of optimizing your business processes and making your accounting and financial management easier. Thus, they must have an intuitive interface alongside a simple onboarding process that doesn’t require investing a lot of time resources.
• Time in the market. Look for a business solution that has been in the market for a fairly long amount of time and has built a reputation as a reliable global partner in the sphere of integrated payments.
• Custom solutions. Since one of the greatest benefits of integrated payments is their full customizability to the needs of your business, look for partners that offer tailored solutions over fixed service packages.
• Scalability. It’s crucial that the integrated payments system is able to facilitate the needs of your company as it scales. Thus, when searching for software solutions, pay attention to those that have enough resources to process large volumes of global credit card payments and offer other benefits you may require as your outreach grows.

Payneteasy incapacitates all the features mentioned above and is here to become your trusted long-term partner in tailored integrated payment services. Reach out to us now and we will get back to you with a custom quote within one business day!