There are many different situations where modern businesses still heavily rely on the ability to process and mail secure paper checks. No matter whether you’re dealing with a small or large volume of check payments, many steps in the process can become severely inefficient.
Fortunately, there are tools and something called a check issuing service that small businesses can implement to make the entire process more efficient.
Not only will it make your business more efficient and cost-effective, but you’ll also find that your clients and vendors will be much happier with the speed at which they receive correct payments.
Here are six things you need to consider.
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Batch Process Through A Check Issuing Service
Large corporations often have in-house printing services for all client and vendor communications, including check printing. Such business processes rely heavily on software systems that integrate with accounting applications and access bank accounts. With this setup, they can batch-process check payments in large volumes, with large parts of the process being automated.
However, such system implementations require significant upfront investments and teams to manage the process.
An alternative option is online check printing or outsourcing the entire process to a company like Insight Incentives. This will provide you with the same efficiencies that large corporations enjoy at a fraction of the costs.
And you won’t have to wait weeks or months to get your team established to handle this new process and manage the latest hardware and software. When an issuer can also implement a check fulfillment service, you will maximize your ROI.
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Review Daily Check Register Reports
Check printing and mailing is not a do-and-forget process. You have to make sure that you review daily reports from your bank account and check your incoming mail to filter out cleared, outstanding, and returned checks. This is vital for accounting accuracy and creating processes for duplicate payment recognition. Especially when you’re striving for same-day check printing and mailing, there are risks of people cashing a check before canceling it and requesting a new one.
At Incentive Insights, our team receives a daily reconciliation file, and we complete all of the reconciliation for you. This includes disputing duplicate items and correcting teller deposit amount mistakes!
Many companies fully integrate these types of reports into your payment processes. However, they typically leave you to build additional layers of protection against check fraud resulting from fraudulent cancellation notices yourself. You don’t have to worry about any of the work when using Incentive Insights to print and issue your checks.
This alone can save you a lot of time, effort, and money compared to handling check payments in-house.
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Set Up Standard Templates
Getting to a stage with standard or branded business checks will allow you to introduce systems and processes that automate mail checks. You can also achieve this with online check printing services, but there can be difficulties in fully integrating with your bank account.
You also have the option to purchase check stock with additional security and fraud prevention features. However, such an option to print checks can be pretty expensive for small businesses.
With Insight Incentives, you can send a standard formatted batch file that contains all the relevant information to mail checks to the right people for the right amounts and with the ability to track them.Such a standard approach makes it easier to manage payments in your accounting software, and handle failed, lost, and canceled payments.
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Establish Standard Procedures
Once business owners get to a stage where they print and mail checks daily to clients and vendors, they quickly understand that this can be a very time-consuming process.
There is a lot more to it than check printing. You must examine the business process and all the decision points for making once-off and recurring check deliveries.
From gathering all the standard data to integrating with QuickBooks online and putting the checks in envelopes ready for posting, every point along the way should follow a routine procedure.
This will help you lower administrative expenses in your finance department that would otherwise be wasted on ad hoc decision and analysis processes. The other solution is outsourcing to a check issuing service such as Incentive Insights. We can help eliminate the burden of this administrative task so you can focus on other priorities.
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Automate Approval Processes
Every outgoing payment should go through an approval process that involves senior staff and managers. But when you handle larger volumes of checks, you need to implement approval and authorization limits for teams at different levels.
You can’t overburden managers by reviewing large volumes of checks, whether you handle them in-house or mail them online.
Implement an approval process that allows certain employees to make payment decisions up to certain limits, and you’ll gain a lot of operational efficiencies.
With the Incentive Insights solution, you don’t have to worry about daily decisions by your team. Deciding the award amounts are handled before the printing file is sent.
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Maximize Check Payment Security
According to the New York Times, check fraud is on the rise. Even small businesses can be significantly exposed to fraud regarding paper checks. And one of the first things you need to consider is investing in high-security check stock.
These checks include security features similar to what you find on currency notes. While they don’t go to the same extent, even some minor security features can help to prevent you from becoming a victim of financial crime.
We take this seriously at Incentive Insights, and our industry experience can help prevent fraud and insulate you from such criminal activity with check stock security features, positive pay, and daily reconciliation that maximize payment security.
Call Us To Find Out More About Our Check Issuing Service
Insight Incentives offers a wide range of services, including rebates, sales incentives and spiffs, commissions, and many other options for automating and outsourcing your check printing and mailing services.
We support businesses of all sizes and offer priority batch printing. This allows you to limit your involvement in the most time-consuming tasks. Such as creating a daily batch list of checks to be sent and reviewing the reports.
We use high-security check stock to eliminate fraud risks, and your customers and vendors will receive their payments in record time.
Call us today to learn how soon you can offload this significant workload.
