Managing customer payments is challenging for any company, especially service-based businesses with multiple locations and offerings. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce a new customer payment portal companies can use to create a better payment experience for their customers and a more efficient process for their teams.
Learn more about the benefits of our new payment portal and how it works.
How does a customer payment portal benefit you?
There are several reasons why offering an online payment portal is in the best interests of your business and customers:
You'll reduce the burden on employees while enhancing company-wide visibility
Imagine you are the CFO for a wellness company that managed businesses including spas, massage therapy offices, yoga studios, and other facilities with unique offerings. All of these businesses operate with relative independence, but your parent company still needs to have its finger on the pulse of sales numbers, revenues, and other key KPIs. Without multi-entity accounting software like Gravity, creating a consolidated financial report for your wellness company means manually entering each entity's financial data into a common spreadsheet at the end of each month.
For team members, this manual data entry can be tedious and prone to error. Even more concerning is the lack of a common system for tracking financial data, which means you don’t have visibility into the overall company's performance until the end of each month. If your spa revenues plummet during a tough month, you have no way of turning those numbers around because you won't know about the revenue dropoff until that month is over.
With Gravity, CFOs and other key stakeholders can see real-time data on the performance of each line of business or entity and make adjustments throughout the month, rather than waiting until the end of the month to fix poor sales performance. Our new customer payment portal enhances that visibility further by providing faster access to real-time payments.
Gravity's online payment portal ensures the security and privacy of your customers' financial information. We maintain PCI compliance by securely capturing only a token from the credit card provider, preventing any sensitive data breaches. Your financial records are updated in real time, guaranteeing accurate and up-to-date accounting information.
Many customer payment solutions on the market today deposit payments directly into your company's bank account, which is excellent for revenue but less efficient for record-keeping.
You may not have access to payments or payment data on an individual office basis and may need to devote staff time to compensate for this information shortfall. Gravity's online payment portal creates a one-stop shop that saves your team from dealing with yet another vendor, reduces data silos within your organization, and further streamlines the receivables process.
Your customers don't just want it; they expect it
Many millennials and Gen-Zers can't imagine not being able to order and pay for items, using their preferred payment method, with the click of a button. The numbers reflect this: 58% of respondents to a 2020 survey said they would stop a purchase if the checkout process was too complicated, and 42% said they would do so if their preferred payment method wasn't available.
While convenient payment options are now widely available for tangible goods, consumers are coming to expect frictionless payment processes for all of their purchases, whether that be a monthly chiropractic adjustment or a series of physical therapy sessions. According to RevSpring's 2023 Voice of the Patient Survey, 56% of patients would likely switch healthcare providers after a poor billing experience. Convenient options like Gravity's online payment portal are an important component of a positive billing experience. So is stellar customer service in the event of a question or problem. Gravity's online payment portal ensures your team has ready access to every piece of information needed to assist customers with any invoicing or payment issues.
You'll receive and process payments faster
By eliminating the hassle of paper-based billing, customer payment portals make consumers more likely to pay their bills and to pay them on time.
This has the potential to reduce the burden on finance teams and administrative staff, who won't need to send customers multiple bills or otherwise chase down payments. They won't need to wait for and then manually enter checks. And when your business has its money sooner, you'll be able to pay your vendors sooner and reap the benefits, including potential discounts.
You'll be able to recognize revenue properly
There are many benefits to proper revenue recognition in addition to the fact that it's required by GAAP. Recognizing revenue in the correct month helps with planning and ensures accurate reporting.
When working with accounts receivable in Gravity, you can choose the date on which you want a particular payment to be applied. If your regular spa customer pays at their June appointment for their next facial, scheduled for mid-July, you can click a few buttons and ensure that payment applies to your July revenues. Gravity also offers more advanced revenue recognition capabilities in a separate module.
Even though Gravity makes revenue recognition as easy as possible, there's a way to make it even more straightforward. With our online payment portal, customers can log in securely, enter their preferred payment method, view invoices, and easily make payments or schedule them for later. This, along with the ability to send billing reminders, makes it that much more likely that payments arrive during the correct reporting period in the first place.
Gravity: always working for you
At Gravity, we’re never content to maintain the status quo. We’re always looking for new ways to make our product more user-friendly, efficient, and advanced so CFOs and finance teams can be even more effective. Our customer payment portal is only one of several capabilities we've recently added to Gravity Software, and there's plenty more innovation where that came from.
Learn more about some of our other new features, including AI-powered invoicing and faster bank book reconciliation.
Gravity Software
Better. Smarter. Accounting.
