Most businesses have a dedicated accounts payable team who spend their days keeping a track of invoices, processing, reconciling, and maintaining records for all payments and expenditures, including payroll, purchase orders, invoices, etc. It’s an essential function in every organization that requires accuracy to ensure payments are processed in a timely manner.
Late payments can lead to challenging supplier relationships and in turn delays in receiving goods. Like any manual process, errors occur from duplicate invoicing or missing information, but they are solvable. In this post, we’ll take a look at the three most common problems with international payments and how to overcome them.
1. Additional Costs
Credit cards are often viewed as a quick and safe way to pay international suppliers. However, companies often don’t factor in the bank fees, which are between 3% - 5% of the invoice value. The bigger the invoice, the bigger the bank fee. If a company is processing multiple international invoices, fees add up quickly.
2. Payment Delays
International bank transfers can take several days as money is moved through the SWIFT network. This can often involve the funds passing through multiple intermediary banks, all with their own codes, until the payment reaches the destination account. The resulting handling fees can cost you an additional $45 per transaction with your customer also facing unexpected receiver fee charges.
3. Reconciliation Errors
Missing or incorrect information on invoices is a common error in every organization. Once the correct invoice is received, an additional headache with international transfers is that companies are often required to book a single payment instead of multiple payments at once. The accounts payable team then has to reconcile each individual payment manually, which takes an average of 7 minutes per transaction.
The good news is by automating and utilizing technology, you can remove these challenges. Transfermate, an SAP Concur financial services partner, has developed a payments solution integrated with Concur Invoice, called PaymentsHub.
PaymentsHub by TransferMate allows companies to manage their invoice payment process by utilizing TransferMate’s payments network, including in 51 U.S. states/territories. This award-winning technology enables the movement of money across borders in 48 hours or less with additional functionality including:
- Make up to 10,000 payments at once
- Provides full visibility of funds throughout the payment journey
- Fully integrated, with invoice and payment data recorded for future use
- Speeds up the invoice approval process
- Identifies inaccurate or duplicate invoices easily
PaymentsHub is available in the SAP Concur App Center. To find out more, get in touch today and talk to a member of our team.
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