This week we launched our latest platform feature, Centime Customer Portal! This new business billing portal revamps the overall customer payment experience to help you get paid faster. Here's what the Centime Customer Portal brings to the table:
- Centralized Billing Portal: Say goodbye to lengthy back-and-forth with customers regarding payment details and collections. Centime's Customer Portal shows your customers how much they owe, along with their payment method options based on your accepted payment types. Give your customers a single place to handle all their billing needs and make payments effortlessly.
- Payment Links in Every Reminder Email: With Customer Portal, you can link outstanding invoices directly within payment reminder emails, making it easier than ever for your customers to quickly make their payments via our intuitive B2B self-service billing portal.
- Secure Information Storage: Safety is our top priority. Centime’s Customer Portal can securely save your credit card and ACH payment information to make future payments faster and easier.
- Offer Early Pay Discounts Without Any Headaches: Delight your customers without subjecting yourself to the stresses of manually managing early pay discounts. Customer Portal offers early pay discounts based on invoice payment terms and automatically removes the discount whenever its time window expires.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Keep reading to get all the details on this new platform offering, and learn how it helps both vendors and buyers solve their largest payment pain points.
Centime Customer Portal: Solving Payment Headaches for Vendors and Buyers Alike
As any finance executive knows, managing and tracking payments can be a headache. Late payments, lost invoices and limited visibility can cause major cash flow challenges for vendors. These issues can be just as bad for buyers, who often struggle with broken accounts payable processes which limit their ability to track and monitor all of their invoices.
Built to solve payment problems and create value for both sellers and buyers, Centime's new B2B billing portal streamlines payments by offering self-service options to customers.
In this blog post, we'll discuss the top payment problems for both sellers and buyers and explain how our newly-released client billing portal streamlines payments to make life easier for each group.
Top 5 Vendor Payment Pain Points
- Late or lost payments. Late and lost payments can easily stunt a business's cash flow. Unfortunately, most teams lack the infrastructure to track their business payment statuses across their customers' outstanding bills. Without this, they can't properly strategize a collections approach and eventually end up hurting their bottom line.
- No payment tracking. AR teams often have no way of knowing when they are going to get paid. This lack of visibility leads to inefficient cash management and limits their ability to properly budget and plan for future growth.
- Manual disputes. Finance teams must often manually resolve customer payment issues. This requires ample time, which is especially challenging for lean organizations that don't have enough staff available to quickly respond to customer inquiries.
- Applying payment discounts. Most AR teams want to offer early payment discounts to incentivize their customers to pay quicker, but the logistics of manually managing them can be a nightmare. As a result, many AR teams can't reliably offer early payment discounts to their clients.
- Managing payment preferences. Communicating and managing multiple payment methods, from credit cards to ACH payments or wire transfers, can be a major challenge for finance teams. Many AR departments report frustration with communicating their payment preferences and terms to customers.
Finance teams have historically had to use piecemeal solutions like merchant processors, accounting systems, and emails or phone calls to track down and organize payments from customers. These approaches ultimately drop the ball due to their decentralized nature, limited AR functionality, and lack of an audit trail.
Top 4 Payment Pain Points for Buyers
Buyers also face several challenges in making payments to their suppliers:
- Late payment fees. Broken accounts payable processes often delay payments, resulting in costly late payment fees. Aside from chipping away at your bottom line, these late payments can also ultimately ruin strategic supplier relationships.
- Lack of visibility and lost invoices. Similar to late payment fees, manual or mismanaged AP workflows can cause AP departments to lose invoices. Without visibility across the AP department, organizations can't see all of their outstanding invoices which means they can’t properly forecast their outflows.
- Manual resolution of issues. Buyers often have questions or issues that require them to chase down their vendors via phone or email. This manual approach is not just frustrating, but incredibly inefficient for AP teams that need answers quickly.
- Missed opportunities for early payment discounts. Early payment discounts are important for a cost center like accounts payable. When teams can't see which invoices offer early payment discounts, they lose the opportunity to save cash for their business.
Introducing Centime's Customer Portal
Centime's Customer Portal solves these payment problems by better connecting buyers and sellers, and streamlining manual processes for both groups. Sellers can now easily manage and communicate their business payment preferences and offer payment discounts while buyers benefit from greater visibility and more information.
Features and Benefits
First and foremost, the new business billing portal makes it easy for vendors to offer discounts, while their customers can see their outstanding invoices, quickly make payments, and see their available payment options.
Centime’s Customer Portal enables our client’s buyers to easily access their open invoices and make payments directly on the payment page, limiting the traditional back and forth between vendors and buyers. Teams that use online payments now can send a link to their customers through reminder emails. This link will direct customers to a customer portal where they can easily make payments for any outstanding invoices using CentimePay.
With Customer Portal, your customers can:
- View all outstanding invoices in one place. Our new B2B payment portal centralizes all payment information onto a single portal that customers can easily access using their email address and a 2-factor authentication code.
- Pay multiple invoices at once with simple self-service. Tired of answering customer inquiries regarding outstanding invoices? Centime's Customer Portal enables your clients to view unpaid invoices so they can self-serve and quickly make payments with our intuitive billing portal.
- Securely save credit card and ACH payment information. No more digging through your notes to find your business credit card information. Centime's Customer Portal securely saves your payment information, making future payments a breeze.
- Leverage Early Pay Discounts based on invoice payment terms. Our Customer Portal makes it easy for customers to take advantage of early pay discounts by clearly stating the invoices with a discount. The result? A smoother payments process for everyone involved
In turn, our Customer Portal helps finance teams to:
- Get paid faster. Centime's Customer Portal makes payments easier than ever for your customers. Click a link to access our online billing portal, instead of calling or emailing AP teams to manually provide them with your payment information time after time.
- Easily apply early payment discounts. Early payment discounts are a pain if you don't have a way to automatically remove them once their offered timeframe expires. Our online billing portal automates early payment discount settings so you can incentivize customers for faster payments, without the headache of disputing payments that try to use an expired discount.
- Control payment preferences. Choose which payment methods your team accepts, and we take care of the rest. We even allow teams to dictate additional processing fees and define rules based on payment amounts.
By streamlining payments, boosting visibility for customers, and providing self-service options, Centime's Customer Portal cuts down on manual work, reduces late payments and improves customer satisfaction.
Conclusion
Whether you're a seller or a buyer, dealing with payment issues can be time-consuming and frustrating. Fortunately, Centime's Customer Portal is an online billing portal that offers both vendors and buyers a much better experience than traditional methods.
Our advanced features create a more efficient and accurate accounts receivable process, improving visibility and reducing the risk of errors. We invite you to experience our latest version today and be sure to watch out for upcoming updates. Get ready to modernize your payments with Centime’s Customer Portal!
