How to Choose the Best Payment Integration for Sage Intacct

With 92.6% of businesses reporting late payments among B2B customers in the US alone, CFOs and controllers need more than a financial ERP to reduce their DSO. A payments app integrated with your Sage Intacct instance is one of the easiest ways to automate your AR department’s payment process and improve your cash flow, but it can be challenging to decide on the best option – especially if you use Sage Intacct.

There is a lot of hype about digital transformation, specifically moving from traditional forms of payments to digital payments automation: everyone seemingly has the next comprehensive platform that will simultaneously boost your profit and reduce costs. When it comes to payments, it should be a simple decision, but it’s not.

For some, looking for a new B2B payments application on top of all their other tasks is a burden. But the data makes it clear that the effort of finding and integrating a payment app to automate AR is well worth the time spent researching different B2B payments solutions specifically designed for Sage.

To make your workload easier, we’ve cultivated a master checklist of every feature your outstanding payments app for Sage Intacct should have and compiled ten questions you should ask during product demos.

First, how much can you really save with payment automation?

Before we get into the nitty-gritty checklist, let’s agree that companies are losing money and wasting resources as a result of using traditional, semi-manual, and outdated payment methods.

Since processing B2B payments quickly is vital to maintaining healthy cash flow, it’s one of the first departments that requires automation. And that’s mainly because of human error that can be caused by your internal team and your customers. To make the process even more arduous, tracking down payments and correcting information only costs you more time, money, and frustration.

Think about the process for receiving checks from your lockbox. The payers will mail in their checks to your lockbox, which will then summarize the available payments and send them to you for verification and processing. If all goes well, they won’t bounce. But, even if you outsource it to a BPO team, this process is time-consuming, costly, and challenging to manage.

With the earliest checks likely originating from the 9th-century, it’s time for a major payments upgrade. But fast solutions like credit card payments have their own trade-offs.

While 67% of companies are content with credit card payments, they often shoulder the processing cost or convenience fee of 2–4% per transaction. Credit cards may be faster, but why should you have to give away your revenue to credit card companies? To eliminate this credit card tax, you may want to switch your customers to free bank transfers, but that can make the user experience messy if you don’t have the right platform.

Bank-to-bank transfers and ACH options are ideal, but setting them up can be time-consuming if you do it manually or with the wrong payments platform.

When choosing the perfect payment app integration for Sage Intacct, it’s essential to consider all the different ways you can save through payment options and how that app will affect your customer experience.

Choosing your perfect payment app for Sage Intacct: a checklist

An integrated Sage Intacct AR payment application should be much more than a workflow email. When adding new automated payment capabilities into your Sage Intacct ERP, you need a program that can complete as much of the process as possible while maintaining PCI-compliant security standards.

At the same time, each payment automation solution for Sage Intacct offers a different level of integration, user experience, and benefits.

We recommend looking for the following essential features:

• A direct plugin into Sage Intacct so you have robust payment capability all from within your ERP
• Accepts next-gen payment options, including zero-fee bank-to-bank payments
• Offers multi-currency billing support
• Uses incentives or convenience fees to eliminate credit card transaction costs entirely
• Schedules payments and easily initiates autopay and recurring billing
• Adds payment links to invoices and billing reminders for payer convenience
• Gives customers a self-service option to select and pay multiple open invoices at a time
• Sets automatic alerts
• Provides a view of collected and pending receivables in your dashboard
• Groups receivables into categories based on status and type
• Reconciles payments in real-time
• Applies collected payments to open invoices
• Receives automatic and detailed transfer reports and ledgers
• Maintains PCI Level-1 DSS compliance
• Enables two-factor authentication and role-level access
• Stores customer payment data securely, preferably with tokenization
• Adjusts payment rails based on your business model
• Allows you to brand the checkout, interface, and payment portal
• Requires minimal maintenance
• Includes fail-safes in case the payer has an insufficient balance in their bank account
• Presents knowledgeable and accessible troubleshooting support and customer service
• Setup discounts for preferred payment methods

These essential and performance-based features will allow you to cut costs and reduce DSO while boosting your revenue and shifting credit card fees from you to the end-user. At the same time, criteria such as data security, two-factor authentication, and PCI Level-1 DSS compliance ensure that you minimize security and compliance risks.

On the topic of security, we prefer tokenization methods for data security, and that’s what we use at Paystand. Tokenization has proven to be more secure than passwords and traditional vaults since sensitive data is replaced with meaningless tokens.

When all is said and done, your AR payment integration for Sage Intacct should make you forget it’s a different platform altogether. So whatever solution you choose, it should integrate completely with Sage Intacct and make it easy to send and track digital invoices.

Questions to ask in your integration demo

Since adding automation and modifying your AR payment process is a long-term commitment, it’s critical to choose the best system for you and your team. This means getting all your questions answered during the live product demo.

Our top 10 questions you should ask about payment apps for Sage Intacct are:

1. How can I access your AR automation features directly from Sage Intacct?
2. What is the integration process? How long will it take?
3. What does the customer side look like?
4. How does your system factor into audits and payment compliance?
5. How “real-time” is the system? How often will my data sync?
6. What happens if there is an error in receiving payments?
7. What happens if my customer doesn’t have enough money in their bank account for a transfer?
8. How many of our users will be able to access your platform?
9. Are there any incompatibilities when we integrate with Sage Intacct?
10. How is our customer data kept secure?

For success, user experience is everything

Ultimately, much of your success with an effective Sage Intacct payment solution depends on the application’s usability for the B2B end customer. The easier it is for these customers to pay, the quicker you get your payments.

When designing our integration with Sage Intacct, the team at Paystand focused on what matters – a clean, initiative-driven experience that encourages customers to choose zero-fee payment options like ACH and bank transfers.

While we can’t speak for every other payment app, we can let you in on how our customer-facing system works. It only takes three steps:

1. You send an invoice to your customer from your Sage Intacct system embedded with Paystand’s “pay now” button.
2. When payers click on the “pay now” button, they are directed to your own privately labeled portal to choose their payment method. For example, you could offer credit card payment but tack on a 3% convenience fee. You can also provide the option to pay through our zero-fee bank-to-bank network, ACH, or another method.
3. If your customers use the bank-to-bank method, you bypass credit card fees, postal time, lockboxes, and manual entries because their payment portal is integrated into your Sage Intacct system. Deposits are made, posted, and reconciled automatically.

Once the customer has paid and the payment has synced with your account, you can pull it up at any time or use the data in your Sage reports.

In other words, when it comes to payment automation for Sage Intacct, the user experience must be just as fluid as the back-office systems. Otherwise, no matter how many unique features you have, customers may forget or delay payments.

Next steps

So far, we’ve talked about critical features to look for when choosing a payment app for Sage Intacct. We’ve also looked at questions to ask at your demo and why you should also investigate the end-user process before deciding.

ERP payment automation is the future of business. Adding the right integration to your Sage Intacct ERP will allow your team to focus on higher-level tasks that can make an impact on your company instead of tracking invoices.

Want to know if our Sage Intacct integration is right for your team? Process Payments Through Intacct with our payment experts today.