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Your CFO’s eyes will light up when your online A/R solution supports automatic payments.

With automatic payments, customers create a set of rules that monitor their accounts and then pay bills for those accounts automatically. Bills can vary in amount and arrive at different times, so automatic payments accommodate variability in customer spending. Rules can include when to pay the bill, pay the minimum due, the full amount, another amount, or up to a maximum amount. Automatic payment solutions keep customers informed of upcoming payments and issues using notifications, let customers change their payment rules to address cash availability, but are generally hands-off and happen without human intervention.

With automatic payments, the A/R department gets a good insight into cash flow for customers that sign up for the feature. With incentives such as discounts, automatic payments can dominate your customer’s payment methods and help eliminate delinquencies. It’s almost magic for your CFO.

Don’t confuse automatic payments with recurring charges supported by many payment providers. Where automatic payments are triggered by bill arrival, bill amount, and due date, and allow the customer to establish payment rules, provider-supported recurring charges usually charge a fixed amount on a specific day of the month and are used mostly for subscriptions. Automatic payments are a far more advanced feature, designed to handle variability in customer spending and payment dates.

During the Great Recession, one of our Financial Services clients used automatic payments as a way of bringing delinquent customers into compliance. They promised not to report the delinquency on their loan or lease to credit agencies if the customer set up automatic payments and made those payments for 6 months. The program was a success, bringing the vast majority of delinquent customers back into compliance within months.

Automatic payments are built into Sorriso Smart Pay. Join our mailing list, or schedule a 15-minute discovery call with one of our industry experts. Let’s see if Sorriso Smart Pay is right for your business!