Do you know how much the money waiting in your payment systems costs you?

A customer pays on Monday. The supplier receives the money on Thursday. In between, the money does nothing — it just waits.

On its way from the customer to the supplier, money today usually travels through several systems. One accepts it, another holds it, a third reconciles it and a fourth pays it out.

This kind of payment infrastructure was not built overnight. It came with company growth, as more tools were added one by one – a payment gateway, bank accounts, a reconciliation tool, compliance, an accounting system. Nobody designed it as a whole. It grew piece by piece.

Each of them may work well. The problem does not arise inside them, but between them.

The cost you will not see on any invoice

With several providers, we naturally look at their fees. The real costs, however, appear between the systems:

• the time the finance team spends moving data manually,
• the errors created at every manual step,
• risk split across several systems and contracts,
• the days money spends waiting, even though it has already been paid.

When data travels between the gateway, the bank, reconciliation and accounting, a person becomes the integration the software does not provide. That is not work. It is glue between four vendors.

At month-end close it shows in full: the finance team does not only process numbers, it investigates why the systems disagree and which numbers can be trusted.

The whole way, in one place

The real solution is not replacing four invoices with one. That would be too little. The benefit is not only that money travels the whole way without moving between systems. It also brings concrete advantages:

• data does not need to be transferred between systems,
• the company works with a single source of data,
• payments are reconciled automatically,
• you see your balance in real time, not after overnight processing,
• money leaves via SEPA Instant 24/7, including weekends and holidays,
• one partner is responsible for the whole way – a licensed payment institution supervised by the NBS with segregated client accounts.

An ordinary bank is a place where money waits. Payout One is a system in which money moves.

Less administration, more time

The benefits of unifying money movement are confirmed by the experience of one of our clients. After implementation, they reduced payment processing costs by 70 %. More importantly, in their words, the finance team got back time for work a machine cannot do.

This is not about replacing people. It is about not tying their time to work that a system should be doing.

When it makes sense to change your payment infrastructure

Not every company needs to change the way it processes payments. It is worth paying attention, however, if:

• you use three or more separate tools to move money,
• your team regularly transfers data between them manually,
• payment volume grows faster than your team's capacity to process it.

If this sounds familiar, the problem may not be in the individual tools. It may be that money and data have to keep travelling between them.

How many days a year does your money spend in transit between systems?