Why growth-focused businesses must supplement ERP Systems with payments

The B2B payments landscape is constantly changing. Maintaining pace is vital to keep up with buyer demands, payment trends, and new regulations. By Brian Gaynor, VP of Product & EU CEO at BlueSnap.

The right payment provider for your ERP System is key to this as it can provide a better buyer experience by offering more ways to pay. It also helps avoid costly fees, which in turn improves agility and gives an edge over competitors. At the same time, it provides businesses with better cash flow and accurate reporting and reconciliation. All this becomes particularly important when companies are looking to scale and need to cater to the differences in payment practices. 

Last year, 57% of businesses stated that their ERP System helped them become more agile. However, many businesses are still missing out. Business leaders should be incorporating the right payment provider with their ERP System so that it acts as a catalyst for growth and increases Return on Investment (ROI).

Plenty of pros: Adding payments to your ERP System

ERP Systems are an excellent way to gather payment data, consolidate workstreams, maintain a growth trajectory, and get an accurate picture of the payment landscape. Adding a Global Payment Orchestration Platform to your ERP System can enable payment acceptance in multiple currencies and payment methods. This brings the dexterity firms need to cater to buyers’ preferences and makes it easier for buyers to complete transactions. 

Buyers too, have their own preferred ways to pay. Offering customers their chosen payment types leads to more revenue via repeat business, a reduction in checkout abandonment, and even increased order volume. When adding payments to an ERP System, offering a variety of payment types can satisfy current and future customer preferences while steering the business toward future growth.

Finally, working with the right payment provider gives companies the flexibility to handpick functionalities to cater to multiple use cases across the B2B and B2C spaces. This agility enables businesses to customise services received and optimise their payment strategy at each stage of growth and in every geography. For example, BlueSnap offers additional services like fraud prevention and chargeback management, which can be added on demand. This gives small and medium enterprises the tools they need to compete with large corporations.

Spoilt for choice: Selecting the right payment provider

Several factors need to be considered when searching for the right payment provider. Businesses operating across regions have to tackle high cross-border payment fees, low authorisation rates, differences in preferred payment methods, and global and regional regulatory standards. However, these pain points can be overcome by supplementing an ERP System with a payment provider that has global capabilities to manage multiple currencies, payment types, and fraud and tax regulations in each country.

It’s worth noting that payment providers manage information flow differently and subtle variations like file formats can make or break an onboarding process. The same is the case with additional payment options, which you’ll likely need as the company expands. Your payment partner should guarantee easy assimilation and deployment with little to no additional coding and development requirements – avoiding surplus costs while supporting business expansion. 

Your chosen payment provider must also be PCI compliant and update merchant agreement terms, privacy policy, and cookie usage in line with GDPR requirements so that you mitigate data security risks and steer clear of fines for non-compliance. By choosing a payment provider capable of this, you also avoid the need for additional partnerships in different regions, which reduces your overall technical debt. 

Reaping Benefits: Making the most of ERP-supplemented payments

Ultimately, ERP-supplemented payments are an asset for any business. By choosing a payment partner that combines the functionalities of a payment gateway and a merchant account, businesses can simplify onboarding and management, reduce costs, prepare for business expansion, and improve efficiency and data security. All this goes a long way in improving buyer trust and satisfaction. Fully incorporating the new payment provider into a corporation’s existing ERP System minimises friction and leverages the capabilities of both platforms efficiently. This also sidesteps duplication of data and gives you a clear overview of the payment landscape. 

To maximise the benefits of the assimilation, businesses must automate as much as possible. This could mean standardised reporting or fraud prevention strategies across geographies, but the more your payment partner handles, the less there is to be outsourced.

In a dynamic and competitive landscape, it’s the subtle differences that can give a business the edge it needs to stand out and generate higher revenue. 

Adding payments to your ERP System is a great way to maximise efficiency and streamline operations, which goes a long way in reducing costs and improving the buyer experience and consequently, profit margins. The seemingly small differences brought about by supplementing your ERP System with a payments provider are the edge enterprises need to flourish.