Summary: If your business is still chasing slow-paying customers, Sage 100 payment processing through Fortis may be the answer. By giving your customers an easier way to pay (and giving you an easier way to apply those payments), you can reduce your DSO and collection calls, while improving your cash flow.
It’s Friday afternoon. Your accountant walks in with the aged receivables report.
Six customers over 60 days. You already know who they are.
You’ve mentally drafted the “our company is going in a different direction” email to them. A few times. You wondered again, this morning, whether it’s time to stop extending credit to a couple of them altogether.
Firing a customer is hard. And maybe, in some of those cases, it’s entirely unnecessary.
Maybe what you really need is a system that manages those customer payments for you.
Your Customers Might Not Be the Problem
When payments are slow, you immediately blame the customer. After all, one assumes they pay their electric bill on time, so why don’t they pay you?
Often, the delay comes down to friction in the payment process itself.
Let’s assume they received the invoice and they totally intended to pay it. But that meant they needed to print a check, get it signed, and bring it to the post office. Or it meant calling your office to give a card number over the phone, during business hours.
So, they bumped the payment to “later,” and your invoice got buried under the next 8 things they were handed.
Be honest here: when’s the last time you nearly missed a payment deadline because of that exact same situation?
The electric bill is easy to pay. Your invoices? Less so.
Some companies running Sage 100 have already addressed part of this problem by automating their overdue invoice reminders, so the right customers get the right nudge at the right time without anyone on their team having to think about it.
But a perfectly timed reminder won’t help much if the payment process still takes extra steps.
Integrated payment processing from Fortis eliminates those steps.
How Sage 100 Payment Processing Works
Fortis is a Sage-endorsed integrated payment solution that brings full Sage 100 payment processing capabilities directly into your system.
When you add Fortis:
- Your customers get a click-to-pay button that lets them pay directly from their invoice by credit card or ACH, along with a self-service payment portal. They never have to call your office or dig up their checkbook.
- On your end, payments post directly back to accounts receivable in Sage 100 automatically. (Yup, that means no manual entry on those payments and significantly fewer check runs.)
The result is that customers pay when it’s convenient for them, which usually turns out to be much sooner than they did when those payments required effort.
More than Just Faster Payments…
Fortis sets the stage for your cash to arrive faster and for your staff to stop spending time on collections calls. But there’s another benefit, too…
- Your DSO Drops
DSO, or Days Sales Outstanding, measures how long it takes to collect payment after a sale. A healthy DSO runs around 30 to 45 days. Anything above 60 days is a signal that something is going wrong.
Many business owners consider DSO to be an internal metric, but a high DSO can hurt your ability to borrow at competitive rates. Lenders look at receivables aging as part of their risk assessment, and that stack of 60- and 90-day invoices tells a troublesome story.
When you give customers a way to pay you instantly (with a system that also sends automated payment reminders), your overdue invoice stack shrinks, your staff gets to skip those nagging calls, and lenders see a healthier financial picture.
That’s a win-win-win.
What “Integrated” Means
Fortis is embedded directly into Sage 100, which means your team works in the same environment they always have, without having to learn a new system, and payments reconcile automatically without anyone having to touch them.
In practical terms, this means that after you set up Fortis, your next Friday afternoon conversation with your accountant doesn’t have to look the same as it does today.
Ask Us About Sage 100 Payment Processing
Want to run the numbers on what integrated credit card processing and ACH payments would look like for your business? We’re happy to walk you through it.
