Paper-based payment methods such as checks and cash are awkward and cumbersome in either business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. The negative impact that these increasingly outdated methods have on both senders and receivers has mostly been ignored, however.
Such legacy payment methods are usually tied to paper-based invoices and manual tracking and reconciliation procedures, which impede payments from being processed in a timely manner. These payment methods also frequently result in firms receiving transactions and associated remittances in various formats that range from emails and Excel files to paper reports. Navigating the sheer multitude of options and matching information across several companies’ systems can be challenging.
Bottomline’s 2019 B2B Survey Payments Report finds that manual processing is the second-most pressing obstacle for treasury departments and the biggest challenge faced by small businesses. Sixty-five percent of surveyed small businesses considered manual payment generation to be the largest impediment to overcome, in fact.