Does Your Business Need An Easy Utility Bill Payment Process?

Utilities like electricity, water supply, internet service, phone service, etc. are lifelines to any business. If you have not cleared your utility bills, your services can be cut off and leave you in the dark — literally. Utility bill processing, payment, and management have become one of the most time-consuming areas even for small and medium enterprises. This complexity increases when the business gears up to become bigger, with multiple stores and offices.

Let’s have a look at how integral processes like utility payments go on to become a prominent concern for corporates.

Common Challenges to Enterprise Utility Bill Management

1. Complex bill management for multiple stores: If a single business unit can’t afford to juggle between so many utility bills, imagine the chaos that is brought in by multiple bills generated for a business’s multiple operating units. Let’s take an example for McDonalds food chain. The fast food chain has multiple outlets in multiple cities in our country. Each unit has multiple bills to pay. In usual practice, each store manager will maintain the record of every month’s utility bills, & then courier it physically to the central office. When the bill copies are physically received, which is of course time taking process in itself, at the central office, each bill is recorded, verified and finally paid! What if you get access to a system of automated bill payments that can make the whole process more efficient?
2. It’s time consuming : The process of gathering information from various sources, maintaining records of physical bill copies, pulling the relevant data and then inputting it in the system is typically very time consuming. You simply cannot capture data timely which then translates to a lag in reporting. These delays can be very costly. What if you get a system that gives you timely alerts?
3. It’s error prone : To err is human. The more manual handling of the data, the more it is prone to error. Manual process has its own limitation to gather data points per bill. Missing out on such information can have a real impact on any resulting business decisions. What if you get a bill payment solution that automatically fetches every important data information for each bill?
4. Limits payment to multiple billers : There can be a very probable scenario wherein a business utility such as electricity for example, for different store locations is billed by more than one biller . For example: the electricity billers for three different store locations in Delhi can be BSES Rajdhani power limited, BSES Yamuna Power limited and TATA power-DDL. Each biller’s payment cycle and mode of payment collection can be different. Some would accept only cheques from businesses, others would want payments only through a demand draft. Managing everything manually means additional expense on manpower. For corporates, it becomes very tedious to find a solution for making timely payments if they are still glued to traditional methods. The chaos gets magnified, when each utility such as water, phone or internet goes the same way. Another signal for you to go digital ? Bingo!
5. Limits optimization of working capital : Timely payment of utility bills is of course important but at the same time it is always a wise decision to have a constant eye on your working capital. Many corporates follow the traditional method of maintaining a cut-off date to make bill payments. However, you can always optimize the usage of working capital if you have a transparent and easy way of analysing your due dates. The modern businesses are moving towards an expense management solution which gives them easy access to their bill due dates and hence they gain a better opportunity to manage their working capital. Now who doesn’t want a winning solution to have crystal clear eyes on their business funds? All at one place.
6. Losing out on early bird incentives : With many billers, paying early can get you more discounts than you could earn as interest by holding onto that money longer. Especially if you have the cash to pay early, you should be able to avail discounts as high as 10% to 15%. Since the bill payment processes are so lengthy and time consuming, they do not allow businesses to get benefits of such discounts. Think again, does your bill payment process allow you to get such benefits?
7. Lacks control over bill payments : For most corporates, the solution to utility bill management lies in outsourcing. But this has its own challenges, as businesses share a good chunk of internal data to a third party. Also, the average processing time is still around 48 hours. And businesses still lack visibility of their dues vs payments until the detailed reports are not shared by the third party.

So, Why Outsource When You Can Manage On Your Own?

It’s time when your business has to become proactive to root out inefficiencies rather than to remain reactive to utility bills. Paytm Payouts brings to you feature packed Enterprise Bill Payments Solution.

• A powerful dashboard tool that gives you complete control of each and every utility bill, their amounts & dues dates, making easy payments, multiple payment options and getting real time information and customized reports for your ERP systems and financial reconciliation.
• Paytm is one of the earliest and most trusted platforms for bill payments in India. Being the biggest recharge and bill payments company, Paytm serves as the largest ecosystem of billers across the country.
• Paytm has integrated with 95% billers in India to provide you almost real time view into pending bills, original bill copies and the best services and success rates.
• You can pay 1000s of bills in just one go with the widest range of payment options.
• Paytm Payouts also allows you to organize and reconcile all types of monthly bills for your multiple offices/stores/ shops or warehouses.
• You can schedule reminders and automate bill payments in a few simple steps.
• Not only this, with regular bill payments through Paytm Payouts you will be entitled for the benefits of early incentive bill payment program.

It’s easy, convenient, reliable and is brought to you by the most trusted name in the bill payments industry.

Along with bill payments, Paytm Payouts provide elaborate corporate friendly solutions for vendor invoice management, employee benefit solutions, approval workflows, expense management and reconciliation needs.