Leveraging Your Bank’s Cash Management Services to Improve Your Business

One of the great benefits for small business owners in this new era of secure technology and business automation is the ability to partner with expert solution providers for all their cash management needs. Cash management is an essential aspect of any business, and small businesses have more options for maximizing their cash position than ever before.

Leveraging your bank’s cash management services can help accelerate cash coming in and carefully orchestrate the cash going out of the business, bringing much-needed flexibility and efficiency to businesses of any size. Here are some of the tools your business bank offers:

Automated Clearing House and Electronic Funds Transfer

The Automated Clearing House worldwide electronic payment network allows almost any type of financial transaction, including vendor invoices, state and federal taxes, and, most commonly, payroll deposits, to be wired from one party to another via “Automated Check Handling” or ACH.

Receivables can be accelerated by utilizing an automated collection system linked to a bank’s Automated Clearing House (ACH). The system provides your billing person with a daily report sorted by age and amount owed so receivables can be prioritized. Payment is then collected using electronic funds transfer through the bank’s ACH system.

An automated payables system allows businesses to time their payments around the actual due dates instead of an arbitrary internal payment schedule. This enables a business to hold on to cash as long as possible and then have payments automatically sent by electronic funds transfers.

Remote Deposit Capture

With the current technology available to small business owners, most cash management services can be set up and managed without setting foot in a bank. Check scanning technology, known in banking circles as remote deposit capture (RDC), enables businesses to process and deposit checks for quicker availability of funds. Instead of expending resources and time collecting and batching checks from multiple locations, a business can use a scanner to transmit them as batch files to its bank over an encrypted internet connection. Banks can process and clear RDC deposits more quickly, making them available within a day or two. With most RDC systems, businesses can integrate their accounting system to streamline recordkeeping and reconciliation.

Online Banking and Bill Pay

Other technologies like online banking and bill payment are designed to work with various software packages and accounting systems. This means that regardless of what tool you use to do your accounting and prepare financial statements, you can download the necessary data directly from the bank without the need to enter the bank.

With online banking, giving each user a tailored level of access becomes possible. After all, your accountant and most employees probably don’t need more than view-only level access to your company accounts. By taking control of employee access permissions, you can establish limited or full access for each employee, helping your business run smoothly and stay secure.

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Payroll Management Tools

Paying employees is an essential part of any business, but it can often be time-consuming and hard to manage. Online Banking for Businesses provides direct deposit capability, meaning no more rush to deposit checks and bank branches. As an added benefit, direct deposit makes cash flow more predictable as all transactions occur simultaneously, and payroll checks are no longer needed. This helps reduce the possibility of payroll fraud and provides an extensive set of records, including payment amounts, dates, and tax information.

Leveraging your bank’s cash management services can help improve your financial operations, reduce costs, and increase profitability. With the advent of secure technology and business automation, small businesses can partner affordably with their bank as expert solution providers for all their cash management needs. Working with your bank to evaluate your needs and develop a customized cash management strategy that puts you in control of your cash flow is essential.

 

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