How to Save Your Business Money

A business without efficiency is a business that’s guaranteed to fail. Optimizing your business efficiency can take many forms, but it almost always boils down to reducing wasted time and resources. Often, businesses overlook inefficiencies in managing finances, but monitoring daily balances, transferring funds, overseeing payables and receivables, and allocating savings can cost hundreds of labor hours each week, lead to costly mistakes, and putting your business behind the competition.

Thankfully, there are many ways to streamline and automate your financial processes with Treasury Management services. These services allow you to keep a high level of visibility into your daily balances, manage your funds with a high degree of precision, and even capitalize on your excess cash at competitive rates of return.

Liquidity and deposit services

In business, having visibility into your finances is key. When you have a deep understanding of your company’s financial wellbeing, you’ll be able to identify pitfalls and opportunities far in advance. But keeping an eye on your finances isn’t always easy. That’s why you need to choose deposit services that can help you achieve your business goals, while also reducing costs.

There are several products that can save you precious time and money:

• Zero Balance Accounts - Manually monitoring numerous accounts can require a significant investment of time, which can lead to increased costs. In these situations, Zero Balance Accounts might be the best solution. These accounts consolidate funds from multiple subaccounts to one master account every night, which means you only need to check one account for balance totals. Knowing your daily cash flow position can make it easier to identify excess balances and investment opportunities.
• Sweep Services – Why not put your daily excess cash to work? A Sweep Account allows you to automatically transfer funds that exceed your predetermined target balance, or are less than your maximum investment amount, into an investment option that earns a higher level of interest. Often, business owners choose to sweep their funds into a money market account, which provides more liquidity and higher interest rates than a traditional savings account.
• Money Market Accounts – Maintaining liquidity is important, but all too often, it comes at the expense of higher interest rates. With money market accounts, business owners get the best of both worlds. Money market accounts allow for higher interest rates than traditional savings accounts, with rates increasing as the balance increases. And most importantly, money market accounts allow for quick and convenient access to funds should new opportunities or cash flow needs arise.
• Business Analyzed Checking - If you operate a business that does a high number of transactions, and have outgrown a traditional business checking account, a Business Analyzed Checking account could be a great cost-saving option. This account allows commercial businesses to streamline financial management, while earning credits based on account balances, to offset fees. Often, Business Analyzed Checking accounts also come with preferred rates on loans, Certificates of Deposit, and Money Market accounts. 

Fraud management

Fraud continues to be a huge problem for businesses. As technology progresses, scammers have seemingly endless tools at their disposal to target your business and impact your bottom line.

Fraud is a one-two punch. Not only do you have to bear the damage of the initial financial losses, but the administrative costs associated with managing a fraud event, or preventing fraud, can be significant.

The adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” may be a cliché, but it’s true when it comes to fraud management. Being able to detect and stop fraud before it occurs is the only way to consistently fight back against the scammers and limit the impact fraud has on your day-to-day operations.

It’s important to choose a financial partner that offers the latest in fraud prevention technology. You’ll want to check for tools like Positive Pay, which helps to identify discrepancies in check numbers and dollar amounts, and ACH Filter, which identifies unauthorized ACH transfers before they even post.

If you suspect you’ve fallen victim to fraud, time is of the essence. Immediately contact your financial institution and report the suspected fraud. A few hours can make the difference between getting your money back and having to write it off as a loss.

Payables and receivables

For many businesses, inefficiency in payables and receivables goes uncorrected, often due to the perceived complexity of implementing proper systems. Many business owners will resign themselves to the idea that the costs are “just the price of doing business,” but that’s rarely true.

In fact, there are many tools that can save your business time and money. When it comes to mastering the payables process, consider the following:

Business Online Bill Pay – Paying your bills online is a great way to improve recordkeeping and reduce costs. Online Bill Pay streamlines payment processes to both vendors and individuals and can even be automated for recurring bills.

ACH Origination – Automated Clearing House (ACH) Origination services can help you streamline payment processing. ACH Origination helps to reduce errors, lower the risk of fraud, decrease payment-processing time and cost, and improve cash forecasting by using electronic payments.

Business Payroll Services – Modernizing the way you manage people, from recruiting to onboarding, developing to paying, can help you retain employees and build a positive company culture. Automating the payroll and recruiting process can help you track time and attendance, comply with state and federal tax requirements, and provide compelling benefits.

When it comes to receivables, it’s always important to collect funds in a timely manner. This improves cash flow management and cash availability, letting you take advantage of opportunities, identify shortfalls, and eliminate costly collection processes. Tools like ACH origination can simplify your cash management process and help you collect payments on schedule with automatic debits from client accounts.

Merchant Services is also a great way to increase efficiency while adding convenience for your customers. Many point-of-sale systems can help you integrate payment options like Apple Pay® or Tap & go®, allowing your customers to pay using their preferred methods. Some point-of-sale systems even allow for app integration to further streamline your business operations and improve reporting.

If you’re a business owner who is struggling with costly mistakes and time-consuming manual processes, let one of our local business experts help. We offer complete business solutions and we put our emphasis on building relationships to understand how best to help you achieve your goals.