The average time to complete a transaction using an integrated payment processing system is just two minutes. With a non-integrated payment solution, the time taken stretches to four to six minutes. While this may not seem like a long time, it can really add up over the course of a day full of visits.
Plus, if you’re on the front desk at a busy veterinary practice, or a client in a rush to another appointment, those minutes can seem like an eternity. That’s why it’s easy to understand why clients and staff alike can become very frustrated with inefficient payment systems.
An average veterinary practice processes around 500 credit card transactions each month. If your practice is using a non-integrated payment system, this works out at 50 hours each month spent on taking payments.
Remove the frustration of long waits in your clinic
The simple step of integrating payments into your practice management software would save an average practice 33 hours each month. That’s just over an hour of valuable time each day your team can win back – to use in more productive ways than handling slow and frustrating manual payments.
Think about the positive ripple effect this would have on your clients, too. Not only does each client have to wait for an average of six minutes while your team processes their payment – but there’s also the cumulative effect of waiting for others who were in the line before them. The busier your clinic, the longer they have to wait.
While these are common examples of the impact of non-integrated payments, there are other areas of your business that are potentially suffering, too.
Payment reconciliation
Balancing numerous credit card batches from several machines is tedious and time-consuming, as is manually reconciling payments and accounts. If, for example, your credit card payments don’t match up – say your Mastercard® report is £100 up and your Visa® report is £100 down – you have to go through your records to find out where the error occurred, and then correct it both in your software and your credit card report.
But, with an integrated payment processing system, transactions are automatically recorded – almost completely removing the opportunity for these kinds of errors to occur. Not only do you get greater visibility and the capacity to create more-up-to-date and accurate reports, but you can also save up to 15 minutes per day by not having to correct the errors too.
Incidental errors
One of the key benefits of an integrated payment processing system is it leaves little room for errors, such as a client being charged incorrectly or an invoice being associated with the wrong patient. Working through these errors and fixing them is a time-intensive exercise, which is bound to frustrate your staff.
An automated system eliminates the possibility for these errors to occur in the first place, which means your staff no longer have to juggle between several different systems while taking client payments.
Here’s another example of how the smarts in an integrated solution could benefit your practice: even if a staff member enters a transaction and selects the wrong payment type, an integrated payment system can recognise this and record the transaction against the right card type. These seemingly small wins can add up over time if they’re repeated, which is often the case in a busy practice.
Integrating your payment processing system with your practice management software will:
- Save your staff time
- Free them up for more valuable client and patient interactions
- Lift morale
Your clients will also appreciate the more efficient payment processing, which in turn will help strengthen your relationship with them and improve customer loyalty.
As a global leader in commerce-enabling technology and solutions, Fiserv has extensive payment industry expertise and a portfolio of trusted payment technologies. With their UK-based customer service and support, their mission is to help clients and partners stay innovative in a fast moving, digital world.
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