Many of the expenses we now have – things like your cell phone, utilities, car payments, and mortgage – tend to be paid by automatic payments. This is one of the many modern conveniences that we have due to technology that many of us may take for granted.
Business leaders like yourself may not have fully accepted the simplicity of such things when paying the expenses of your company. Maybe you have, in some things. The chances are good that paying things like your UPS and FedEx invoices don’t fall into that “automatic payment” category. Instead, they’re paid ad hoc and manually.
However, there are a few fantastic reasons to change that. Here’s a look.
Parcel Payments Can Be Consolidated
It isn’t uncommon for businesses, especially ones that have multiple locations or many accounts, to receive quite a few invoices on a daily basis from UPS or FedEx. Many can receive more than 30 in a single calendar month. If you get the right parcel payment platform, you can save yourself a lot of the work that goes into paying these invoices. Doing it manually is not an efficient way to use resources and time when you could have them paid automatically without risking an oversight error.
Consistent Process
The challenge of having to pay many bills for multiple accounts can be exacerbated when many payment processes and carriers are involved – from various due dates to different methods of payment. The best thing to do here would be to simplify the process. By automating your bill payment, you can be sure to adhere to the preferred payment method of each carrier without additional work for your team. By doing this, you might even end up with payment files that you can import right into your ERP.
Audit Credits
When you schedule your payments to be made automatically, you’ll be able to wait later for the payment window of each invoice without additional risk. This is key when it comes to maximizing any refund credits. It’ll be easier to audit the invoices and ask for credits before you pay the invoice.
Late Fees
By utilizing a parcel payment platform, you won’t just be helping to digitally transform your business; you could also be saving a bit of money. Over the course of a year, how many late fees do you pay when manually paying all of your parcel invoices? That money is wasted, but there’s an easy fix. Make use of a parcel payment platform that will maximize the amount of time you keep your money while also ensuring that you don’t end up paying late fees.
Short Pay – The Necessary Evil
You won’t need to make educated guesses at accounting for any credits before paying FedEx, aka short paying their invoices. Automated parcel payments will take care of all of the math while ensuring that you don’t under or overpay any carrier. Timing is critical. Attempting to reconcile your invoices against your payments can be rather tricky due to FedEx adjusting your original amount on an invoice to reflect any approved credits.
The convenience that comes with even more savings, along with operational efficiency, doesn’t have any additional cost for you. When compared to the time saved by paying these bills automatically, time that could be spent completing other necessary tasks, and the money saved by avoiding late fees and getting the credits you should be getting, the cost of a good parcel payment system is negligible. Why waste time and money on the hassle of paying all of these invoices when you just don’t need to?
