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Article: Are You Tracking Accounts Receivables?

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Billing and Payment: Value beyond a standard ACH solution

• By using NextBill for billing, you avoid the paper chase involved with setting up traditional ACH debits. Rather than having to hassle your customers to submit a copy of a cancelled check or deposit slip with a signed authorization form, NextBill EBPP uses an alternative validation model. The success rate is substantially higher with NextBill EBPP than is achieved with standard ACH because all that the customer needs to do is enter their routing transit number and account number on the secure NextBill payment site to immediately begin to schedule payments electronically. In addition, you may opt to provide multiple payment options beyond ACH and also accept recurring credit card payments.
  
• Unlike normal ACH payment services offered by most commercial banks, NextBill allows payments to be set up as regular recurring payments. On the same date each month, an ACH debit is automatically sent to the payer’s bank account and then an offsetting credit will be sent to your bank account. NextBill’s payment architecture allows the sender to adjust the payment up or down as needed.
  
• Your customers will feel more at ease signing up for recurring billing with NextBill EBPP. Unlike standard ACH auto debit where the payment comes out on a predetermined date, the NextBill service gives your customer the control to modify a scheduled payment if necessary. Obviously you want control of the payment date; however, you don’t want a rejected ACH or unnecessary customer service problems from “good” customers. In this case, the preferred solution is to give your customers the ability to make the required edits to the payment delivery date (this will also increase adoption because customers feel more in control). When they do make changes in the scheduled payment, you will receive an email advising of the new payment date and amount to be deposited. If a client is having cash flow problems, your collections department can be notified immediately so that they can contact the customer. Then, if there is going to be a serious payment problem, the collections department can cut off service sooner and reduce the scope of potential loss. Further, just by being faster off the mark, your collections department can put themselves ahead of other creditors trying to get paid.

  Another benefit of NextBill EBPP over standard ACH is that it is not an all or nothing program. This is good for those clients who refuse to sign up for auto billing for the very fact that they lose control of cash flow. The NextBill EBPP service provides an electronic option that standard ACH does not by giving these “hold-outs” the control of the date and amount but still getting them to accept and pay invoices electronically.

• Business-to-Business transactions require documentation. Payment is only one piece of the transaction – often times the information that goes along with it (PO’s, invoices, remittance information) and the processes around issuing the payment (manager level approvals, double signatures, payment timing, disputes, etc.) are equally important. With standard ACH, this invoice data is not available electronically. NextBill offers interactive billing options. For example, an electronic bill can display multiple line items and allow authorization for each. If a customer chooses not to authorize a line item, NextBill automatically changes the bill’s total. A biller can also provide disputed line item processing routines and link directly to its customer service call center for bills with disputed line items.
  
  Customers receive bills directly in their email boxes not just an email notification that a bill is available. Because NextBill sends bills directly to customers’ email boxes, they can be viewed and paid from a wireless device with Internet access. NextBill maintains a rolling history of past bills, typically for the last 12 months. Customers easily can view, save, and print bills and payment records, which can reduce customer service calls. Your client can print the bill from their email so they can route it through their normal approval and payment processes as they have in the past, or they can forward the email with the bill through the appropriate channels for approval or use the NextBill Automated Approval Processing option.

• While most billing is inherently a batch process, there are times when you need to generate an invoice immediately. For one-time invoices that need to be sent in a timely fashion throughout the month instead of at the end of the billing cycle in batch format, NextBill EBPP handles this too. Send these non-recurring bills immediately and avoid the time consuming manual paper processes. Get these bills to your clients sooner and get paid faster. Also, your clients can schedule payments for up to one year in advance so they will not forget to send a payment on time. This type of billing can’t be done using standard ACH procedures.
  
• There is no need to write complex interface programs to import and export billing and payment information. NextBill accepts billing information in existing print, flat, or XML file formats to generate electronic bills. The system exports payment information in the company’s format.

» Important system features of NextBill