Outside of typical operating hours, business owners spend a ton of time behind the scenes to keep things running. Paying bills, tracking income and expenses, and countless other tasks often eat up nighttime and weekend hours.
It’s understandable that owners jump at the chance to significantly reduce the time they spend managing cash flow. To give you a head start, we’ve outlined a few game-changing cash management tools and how they can help you level up your business.
Tip #1: Use ACH to Send and Receive Money
Automated Clearing House (ACH) is a secure, electronic financial network created to transfer money from one account to another without paper checks, wire transfers, credit card networks, or cash.
Using ACH, you can:
- Streamline payments to suppliers, business partners, and employees.
- Time payments to give your business a more predictable cash flow.
- Schedule payments in advance to avoid missing deadlines.
- Reduce postage, check handling costs, and reduce the risk of check fraud.
- Easily track your expenditures with commercial accounting software.
Just like ACH makes it easier to pay your suppliers, the same holds true for collecting payments. ACH lets you collect recurring fees, membership dues, donor payments, and fixed contract payments such as rent. Customers provide you with their financial institution information, and the electronic payment system draws those payments into your checking account. Simple as that!
Tip #2: Protect Yourself Against Fraud
Fraud is a never-ending worry for business owners. However, there are services like Positive Pay that help you take more control over funds moving into or out of your business account.
Positive Pay helps protect your checking account by carefully tracking and controlling check and ACH payments and preventing fraudulent transactions. You can also get alerts for possible fraudulent activity and stop it before your business takes a financial loss.
