The Ultimate Guide to Accepting Invoice Payments with Sage Intacct

Businesses everywhere understand managing their accounts receivable and billing processes are critical for running their operations. These processes can be mundane and time-consuming, but providers like Sage Intacct can streamline the process and help reconcile your accounts quickly and help you get paid faster.

Sage Intacct, a BlueSnap partner, provides cloud-based financial management software that allows clients to consolidate data, provide multidimensional reporting and simplify compliance. With Sage Intacct, you can create tailored dashboards, modernize accounts payable and accounts receivable, and build detailed reports to create a powerful financial resources tool.

BlueSnap’s global payment and AR automation capabilities help users get more out of accepting invoice payments with Sage Intacct by expanding their accounts receivable capabilities and offering more ways to pay.

This guide explains:

The Business Case for Invoice Payments & AR Automation with Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct Payment Use Cases
How to Reduce Global Payment Costs in Sage Intacct
Payments Compliance & Security in Sage Intacct
Payment Reporting & Analytics in Sage Intacct
Global Payments Acceptance in Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct Payment Gateway Options: How to Choose the Right Payments Partner
How BlueSnap’s Integration with Sage Intacct Works

The Business Case for Invoice Payments & AR Automation with Sage Intacct

Manual invoicing and the accounts receivable process can be riddled with inefficiencies, unnecessary costs and late payments. These late payments are hindering 37% of companies from being able to accurately forecast their cash flow, and about a third have lost customers and contracts because of their manual AR processes.

With the right AR automation software, you can streamline your quote-to-cash process and manage workflows to get paid faster. The option to automate multiple aspects such as invoicing, billing, communications, documents and reporting can be crucial for your business. Additional features such as implementing new payment methods for customers can support on-time payments, reaching new customers and increasing your revenue.

You need to select a payment provider that’s integrated with Sage Intacct who can help grow your business by improving your authorization rates and eliminating the unnecessary fees associated with payments through payment optimization and surcharging.

Sage Intacct Payment Use Cases

Finding the right payment and AR automation solution for your business can take considerable time, but it is important to find the right provider who can fully support your needs. Sage Intacct offers multiple ways to help your business accept payments, including:

• Contract and Subscription Billing: Streamline workflows across the accounts payable cycle with speed and efficiency.
• Project Costing and Billing: Simplified billing brings new levels of efficiency to transform how your professional services firm bills for projects.
• Revenue Recognition: Automate complex revenue accounting, configure expense amortization and more.

How to Reduce Global Payment Costs in Sage Intacct

Optimizing your payment offering within Sage Intacct can play a pivotal role in your success by using tools to increase your revenue and reduce costs. And to reach customers globally – if you choose – you need a payments platform that can handle the complexities of cross-border payments. You need the right tools to get the most out of your payments, including:

• Intelligent Payment Routing that automatically routes transactions for the highest likelihood of approval while helping you avoid unnecessary fees.
• 3D Secure for online payments to protect your business and reduce exposure to fraud.
• Tokenization to simplify PCI requirements and earn repeat customers.
• Account updater to keep subscription payment and card-on-file information updated so you don’t lose sales when their card expires or changes.

In addition to payment optimization tools, you should also consider functionality like compliant surcharging. With surcharging, a fee is added to transactions for those customers who choose to pay by card, ACH or BECS to cover the cost of processing for the business. By passing payment fees to the customer, your business eliminates the expense while allowing customers to still choose their preferred payment method. Look for a surcharging feature that is compliant with applicable laws, rules and regulations addressing the use of it to get the most out of surcharging.

Payments Compliance & Security in Sage Intacct

Accepting payments through your Sage Intacct account while keeping customer data safe should be a top priority for your business. Implementing tools such as Level 2 data parameters or Level 1 PCI DSS can help keep your payments secure, depending on the regions you sell into.

Level 2 data requires additional customer information when processing their transactions to make it easier for organizations such government or corporations to monitor and track expenses. The mandatory information for Level 2 may differ depending on the card networks, but the included information can be used to identify the customer to combat fraudulent transactions from occurring.

BlueSnap is also PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant, which is the highest standard of PCI compliance, and we work tirelessly to maintain secure systems. Whenever cardholder payment data is transmitted, processed or managed through the BlueSnap platform, BlueSnap takes responsibility for the proper security of the sensitive data entrusted to us in accordance with PCI-DSS requirements.

Payment Reporting & Analytics in Sage Intacct

Compiling detailed reporting on your payment and transaction data leads to faster reconciliation and can streamline strategic business decisions. It can also prove to be a highly valuable tool to understand your sales strategy and help make strategic decisions.

Look for a solution that normalizes all payment data. This creates operational efficiencies and puts essential information at your fingertips, allowing you to use it to drive sales decisions and grow your revenue.

Global Payments Acceptance in Sage Intacct

Providing a payment experience that helps you stand out can support customer retention, sales, revenue growth and expansion. A solution that can offer preferred global payment methods and currencies, sophisticated payment routing through a network of banks, and lower or potentially eliminate cross-border fees will keep you and your customers happy. Not to mention, you want to make sure you can easily and accurately report on all your transactions and reconcile your accounts.

Sage Intacct Payment Gateway Options: How to Choose the Right Payments Partner

Sage Intacct partners with numerous payment gateways, but not all possess the same feature set. You need to look for the payment platform that has the capabilities to help get the most out of your payments along with fully integrated AR automation that will truly transform your business. Look for these features:

How BlueSnap’s Integration with Sage Intacct Works

Businesses using Sage Intacct for invoicing and billing can integrate their financial operations with BlueSnap to enhance their AR automation and collections with a single integration to BlueSnap. Merchants can automate the entire quote-to-cash process and accept payments wherever their customers are located, benefit from local acquiring in 50 countries and get unified reporting for easy reconciliation. BlueSnap customers receive a consolidated view of their global business and the ability to streamline operations without the need for multiple payment gateways for each region they sell in or additional AR solutions to manage your invoicing and billing.

BlueSnap’s integration with Sage Intacct is powered by our Global Payment Platform that has our AR Automation solution built-in, enabling businesses to optimize payments wherever they sell and benefit from value-added services. Utilize our suite of payment optimization tools like Intelligent Payment Routing, fraud and chargeback management, reporting tools and more. We even offer multi-entity and multi-currency support to help your business get the most out of a single integration.

A valuable feature built-in to our AR Automation solution to help businesses save on the costs of card, ACH and BECS payments is surcharging. By adding a surcharge fee during checkout, customers paying by card or ACH will have the transaction fee passed on to them. By enabling this and passing the cost of your transaction to the customer as permitted by card brand rules, you save more revenue that will directly impact your bottom line.

BlueSnap’s platform is fully compliant with all privacy, security and card scheme rules so you know your business complies with industry standards. Plus, we have built-in tax solutions to help you meet regional requirements.

Using BlueSnap and Sage Intacct together can help your business:

Improve Cash Flow: Streamline the quote-to-cash process and your workflows to reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) for more efficient invoice processing, recurring payments and collections.

Improve Forecasting & Planning: BlueSnap automatically tracks your invoices, giving you accurate data to properly communicate with customers. BlueSnap bidirectionally syncs with Sage Intacct for seamless reconciliation and reporting.

Enhance Customer Experience: Enable customers to pay their invoices and balances, update billing information and view important account documents directly through a branded self-service customer portal.

Increase Productivity: Automate each step of your billing, accounting and payment process through one application – no coding required.

The Benefits of Using BlueSnap with Sage Intacct

Every business has a different approach when it comes to their Accounts Receivable process and accepting payments. BlueSnap can cover your use case and specific needs, all while helping you reduce manual processes and increase your revenue. Here are some of the benefits we can provide:

Payment Optimization Tools: BlueSnap has a suite of tools to help you increase your revenue and reduce costs. With BlueSnap’s Intelligent Payment Routing, transactions automatically route to minimize declines and maximize gains. Along with features such as Level 2 data processing, 3D Secure, and tokenization and encryption, we can help you get the most out of payment optimization.

Automated Workflows: Automate multiple aspects of your Accounts Receivable management, like customer communication, scheduled payment reminders, follow-up notifications and more from a single interface.

Invoice Management: Automated AR solutions are designed to make invoicing a breeze. Measure how well each software enables end-to-end invoice management. Take advantage of native features or those that could be used in conjunction with your ERP like branded invoice templates, auto-send options, customer communication and workflow automation, predefined late-fee triggers and an online portal that lets customers access and pay their invoices from anywhere.

Digital Proposals & eSign: Improved documentation is a considerable benefit of AR software, especially if you’re moving from paper-based records to a digital solution. Your software should include electronic record-keeping tools to store customer information, quotes, agreements, relevant product and service guides and more. Plus, look for eSign features that automatically accept, track and follow-up on customer signatures.

Billing & Subscription Management: The right-fit automation solution should cover more than just the path to one-time payment. Look for software that supports recurring payments, subscriptions, usage-based billing cycles and auto-payments. This functionality makes it easy for your customers to pay off invoices and stay up to date on their latest charges with stored payment methods and detailed billing data.

Compliant Surcharging: By passing payment processing fees to customers, businesses can reduce expenses while allowing customers to choose their preferred payment type, including credit cards, which businesses might otherwise not want to accept because of the associated fees.

How you choose to support payments in Sage Intacct can make a difference to your business. BlueSnap’s Sage Intacct integration is designed to help you automate the end-to-end invoicing process by reduce costs, improve efficiency, and get paid faster through our Global Payment Platform.

Contact BlueSnap today to learn how we could be the right provider for your Sage Intacct payments.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is accounts receivable?

Accounts receivable (AR) is the money owed to your business by customers. It mainly involves managing and tracking invoices to ensure payments are received on time.

What is the accounts receivable process?

The AR process includes sending invoices, following up on unpaid ones, receiving payments and updating records. In many businesses, this process is mostly manual.

How can integrations improve AR?

Integrations streamline your AR process by connecting systems like accounting, CRM and invoicing tools — reducing manual work and helping you get paid faster.

What is AR automation?

AR automation, or accounts receivable automation, is the process by which manual accounts receivable tasks such as producing, sending and uploading invoices are instead handled by software. AR automation software can handle the entire accounts receivable process, allowing you the ability to automate any task you’d like to optimize.

What is BlueSnap?

BlueSnap helps businesses accept global payments a better way. Our All-in-One Payment Orchestration Platform is designed to increase sales and reduce costs for all businesses accepting payments.

BlueSnap supports payments across all geographies through multiple sales channels such as online and mobile sales, marketplaces, subscriptions, invoice payments and manual orders through a virtual terminal.

And for businesses looking for embedded payments, we offer white-labeled payments for platforms with automated underwriting and onboarding that supports marketplaces and split payments.

With one integration and contract, businesses can sell in over 200 geographies with access to local acquiring in 45+ countries, 110+ currencies and 100+ global payment types, including popular eWallets, automated accounts receivable, world-class fraud protection and chargeback management, built-in solutions for regulation and tax compliance, and unified global reporting to help businesses grow.