Card payments are the future of maintaining a healthy business
Your business is fuelled by the flow of money in and out and getting paid on time is critical. With card payments becoming the norm for consumers, in this article we take a look at the benefits of accepting card payments.
Paying by card is a lot easier for your customers: with fewer people carrying around cash, hunting down a cash machine or making a visit to a bank can be a real inconvenience for your customers: you need to make it as simple as possible for them to pay you.
But there are other benefits to card payments, which make it easier to run your business, including:
- Get paid securely: Having cash onsite comes with its own risks. Card payments eliminate worries over keeping cash securely and having to move it between your office, shop or home and the bank.
- Become the master of your own business: Digital payments can help you better understand your business and allow you to spot trends in the transactions. With card payments you can get a record from your bank of all the payments made into your account, how much they were for and what time and date they were made. Downloading a spreadsheet of your payments at the end of each month can help you spot patterns in your business. For example, are your customers making smaller, more frequent purchases at the weekend and larger, less frequent purchases during the week? This kind of insight can help you make informed decisions about how you run your business and promote your services.
- Think ahead for card payments: Card payments mean that you can take a payment on the spot – especially if you are in a ‘mobile’ business, serving customers in their home. This is especially important for large payments. Often customers do not have a large amount of cash on them, or do not have the correct amount of change. Look ahead to a more exciting future by making it easier to reduce payment delays.
- Future-proof your business: You may have plans to start taking bookings or pre-payments online, through an online market place or app. Accepting card payments now will help you as you prepare to set up your business for the future. Better yet, some card payments providers can even help you to build a new web shop or move your old one to another platform with ease. This means you can also manage all of your online and in-store sales in one place.
There’s more to card payment than getting paid. Ultimately, the future is digital. It’s important to provide your customers with the payment options that suit their needs, and, the benefits of being able to quickly and efficiently take digital payments will best serve your business as it scales. From being able to better assess your business cash flow to building your brand as a professional service in the eyes of your customer, accepting digital payments are a worthwhile investment.
If you are already up and running with card payments, check out how you can get smarter with your accounting in this article here: Your guide to cloud accounting software.
