The days of organizations mailing out invoices and billing statements to their customers are slowly but surely coming to an end. Technology is making sure of that. What’s replacing snail-mailed billing statements? It’s not just one particular service type, but near the top of the list would be Bill Presentment Solutions. 

At the top of the list of reasons why is the reduction, or even the elimination of, customer service man-hours an organization incurs dealing with sending out, and more importantly, processing the received items that come back in the mail.

On average, a paper based invoice costs a business $4.00 to send, receive and process. A bill presentment solution can easily cut that number in half, not to mention the time savings and speed to deposit vai electronic transactions over paper check handling. 

While just about any organization that has access to a half-decent webmaster can implement some type of website payment solution, bill presentment solutions are generally much more complex and require a development team to integrate to a payment API and provide for a front-end system that presents the billing statements and then reconciling with their accounting package being used. Another way to accomplish implementing such a system would be to locate something out of the box that can integrate on the reporting side. In many cases, a bill presentment solution would provide a web portal for an organization’s customers to search for their billing statements, locate and remit payments.

Advanced features can also be part of the feature-set of a ready made bill presentment solution. For example, forcing an older invoice to be paid first, providing for partial payments and allowing an organization to define what field data is searchable for locating an invoice. If an organization is taking phoned-in payments via customer service lines, adding on an IVR payment system that integrates with a bill presentment platform can further reduce costs. Some bill presentment platforms not only integrate for reporting delivery, they can utilize the very same data file to populate both systems. This means both systems run in concert and when an invoice is paid via one system, the other knows the outstanding bill has been paid.

Some features to look for in a bill presentment solution:

• Ordered Billing: Organizations can require their customers remit payments in a specific order. For example, oldest outstanding invoice must be paid first.
• Payment modalities: In addition to credit card payments, ACH (eCheck) transaction lower processing costs and lend themselves well to organizations with ongoing customer relationships.
• PDF Invoice: Customers should be able to download a customized pdf document for storage.
• Bill Definition Files  should be updateable whenever needed via secure FTP.
• Receipts: Billers can setup automated email delivery of payment receipts using the dashboard notification system as well as print receipt function.
• Customize the Customer search experience: Multiple fields can be employed to make the user experience easy for your customers to locate and pay their bills. The following fields can be used for search fileds:
  • Customer ID
  • Customer Name
  • Unique Bill ID
  • Bill Number
  • Address
  • Any of the additional four biller definable fields.

Agile Payments has been providing solutions that enhance cash flow for organizations of all sizes for almost 19 years. Contact us to discuss your bill presentment requirements.