Sage accounting now offer full payment facility = start in bank services decline?
by Kylene Casanova
How much payment services are no longer the sole preserve of banks is shown by how the accounting service providers such as SAP, the dominant ERP provider, and Sage, a leading SME provider, are extending their value added payment services. SAP are even providing a replacement for inter-bank communications network - the Financial Services Network - as well as payment services. While the SME accounting providers are all extending their payment services.
Sage Pay
Sage, the leaving SME accounting solutions company, has a well eastablished service Sage Pay providing an integrated, flexible and secure service for businesses to accept incoming payments into their accounting system. Recently they added a new feature to Sage Payments: enabling customers to manage and make domestic and international payments straight from their Sage 50 Accounts and Sage 50 Payroll software. This is a comprehesive payment service as shown in the figure below:
Source & Copyright©2015 - Sage Payment (UK) Ltd
Sage now offers a holistic end-to-end payments solution that integrates with Sage accounts and payroll software and enables them to take control of all of their money movements.
Sage claim their payment service now provides:
- Time Saving: make payments within Sage software, removing the need to manually re-key information into Internet banking. Automates reconciliation, funding and exchange rate calculation processes to save time and improve accuracy.
- Greater control of cashflow: set future dated payments to help monitor cashflow and create a full digital audit trail to provide control over authorisation
- Cost savings and transparency: competitive and transparent domestic and FX pricing through a choice of tiered plans
- Domestic and international: make payments to the UK and 23 other countries worldwide with support for 11 different currencies through Sage’s Foreign Trader module.
- Access anywhere: view and approve payments from your mobile and tablet devices.
The importance of Sage Pay is shown by Wendy Blane, Accounts Administrator, FBS Engineering & Sanitary Supplies Ltd allowing herself to be quoted. “Sage Payments is a quick, easy and efficient way to make payments with full control,” explained Wendy Blane. “Paying our suppliers straight from our Sage software not only saves valuable time and helps to reduce our banking costs, but will ultimately avoid errors and make us more efficient. For small businesses like ours, managing payments can be a time-consuming process and Sage Payments promises to alleviate that burden by transforming the way we manage our money.”
CTMfile take: Integrating payment initiation and receipt processing within the accounting systems certainly makes it more efficient for SMEs to make/collect payments. Indeed the accounts administrator said, it is “transforming the way we manage our money.” For banks, this should be alarming because ‘managing money’ is what they do. While for SMEs the competition for their services can only be a good thing.
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