4 reasons to buy-not-build your payments process

Payments: they’re fundamental to the success of your business. 

To begin with, you collect payments as you go and it’s manageable. As you start to grow, you acquire more customers and billing becomes a full time job. Time spent collecting, chasing and processing payments takes over and the strategic decisions that will help your business to grow don’t get made. 

This is where it’s time to start looking at ways in which you can speed up and optimise your payments process. And this is where the debate to buy-not-build begins. 

We look at 4 key reasons why you should seriously consider buying, and not building, your payments strategy if you’re trying to scale rapidly.

A dedicated provider

Just as you’re dedicated to solving a business issue for your clients, so would a third party payment provider be dedicated to being the best at meeting all your payment needs. 

Leveraging that external expertise not only means that you’ve got people dedicated to making your payments process more efficient, it also means you don’t have to invest in that talent internally, saving you time and money. That talent is already developed and ready to go. 

Commitment to research and development

New features and technology are constantly being developed. Keeping up with these new developments and understanding whether they’re right for your business can be almost impossible when faced with the challenges that finance teams have to handle. 

Third party providers will have the research and development of new products as a key part of what they do. They’ll want to stay ahead of the competition and will therefore be continuously iterating their solutions and looking at new technology to enhance it. 

They’ll also be able to recommend the right new technologies and features specific to your business needs. This means you can benefit from new technology, without having to test, build and manage it and put in the initial investment. 

Maintenance of technology 

One of the main challenges when building your payments process in-house is the maintenance involved and time taken to fix issues when they arise. A small issue or fault can absorb days of your team's time, often taking away precious hours from being spent on business development. 

Even after the important implementation process is done, third party providers will have dedicated teams of engineers and customer service on hand to help with any possible issues. It’ll be in their best interest to ensure failures and issues are minimal and dealt with quickly and smoothly. 

Freeing up cash

The initial outlay of buying new software can seem a hefty investment at first. It’s only when you look deeper into where money is being held up within a manual payments process does the investment seem worth it. 

Even in the short term, before the long term return on investment is realised, an automated system can reduce your time to get paid, reduce payment failure and improve recollection when payments do fail.

Improvements to cash flow mean more working capital to develop and grow your business. It can also help you to increase your overall business valuation. 

Use our working capital calculator to see how much cash you could free up by automating your payments process. 

Spending time searching for and integrating a new payments provider can feel like it’s taking away from what you need to be doing. But automating your process early can pay dividends in freeing up your time so that you can focus on business growth and scale your business.

To find out more about businesses that have made that investment early, look at these 5 businesses who have optimised their payments strategy to help with scaling.