The popularity of cash is dipping. Cashless payment methods, such as mobile wallets and credit cards, are on the rise. Although cash won’t completely go away anytime soon, many consumers now prefer the ease and convenience of digital payments and credit cards. The global pandemic further fueled the rise of cashless payment.
If the payment options of your small business are limited (or just cash), you may be missing out on potential sales and driving away customers who prefer contactless payments. If this is the case, you should consider expanding your payment options by working with a reliable digital payment solutions provider, such as Onbe.
So why should you go beyond accepting cash and open up to other methods of payment?
Consider the following reasons:
1. Simplifies Accounting
Accounting is a major challenge for small businesses that choose to accept only checks and cash. At the end of every business day, your staff needs to count and reconcile the cash, which can be frustrating and time-consuming for employees. What’s worse, manual-based accounting processes are susceptible to human error. This makes maintaining accurate records difficult.
Navigating payments from customers to partners and vendors can quickly turn into an accounting nightmare for small businesses maintaining a complex cash flow network. No entrepreneur wants to feel like they are spending more time taking care of admin work than focusing on their product, brand or customers.
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When you consider cashless payment options, you can help centralize the financial processes of your business within an online system. Given that a computer program or online platform records transactions automatically, maintaining a historical and accurate record of payments received from customers is much easier for you and your staff.
2. Improves Checkout Efficiency
Customers today have a lot of things on their plate. The last thing they want to do is to spend time waiting in line to check out.
This is why well-known companies, such as Starbucks, have been promoting mobile order-and-pay apps that let customers pay ahead of time. What’s more, Amazon Go, a revolutionary chain of convenience stores in the United Kingdom and the United States, is leading the trend of stores without a cashier. The establishment doesn’t have lines and checkouts. Just grab what you need and go. Amazon Go automatically charges your account when you leave the store with your goods.
Here’s another great benefit of going cashless: you can do business on the go. You won’t have to stay next to the cash register just to offer your products or services. Digital and mobile payments allow you to be where your customers are. This is ideal if you want to participate in local business fairs and pop-up shop events.
3. Cuts Down the Risk of Theft
Keeping cash on hand bumps up the likelihood of theft. There’s a possibility of robbery by random criminals, as well as the chances of your employees taking money from the cash register.
You can always install security systems to keep burglars away, but you can take security a step further by relying less on cash and more on digital payment options. This keeps your company assets secure and increases the safety of your employees.
4. Minimizes Operating Costs
Hiring someone to handle cold, hard cash is not cheap. You have to spend money and time training employees how to man the cash register, handle cash payments effectively and count register balances.
Then, there’s the issue of transporting cash. If your store collects a high volume of cash, you may have to hire an armored car to bring and deposit the money to your chosen bank. This can cost anywhere from a hundred to more than a thousand dollars, depending on the volume of cash and distance traveled by the armored car.
The costs don’t stop there. Once you’re at the bank, business owners have to pay fees for processing and depositing large amounts of checks, coins or cash.
As you can see, collecting, handling and depositing physical volumes of cash are expensive and troublesome. Rather than stick with this process, consider accepting cashless payment options. When you manage payments digitally, you can get rid of the expenses associated with the physical handling of cash.
5. Draws Savvy Customers
Accepting cashless payments can help attract a desirable customer base. Business establishments that prioritize digital or mobile payments will appeal to tech-savvy, young customers. If you’re targeting this demographic, you’ll want to try to embrace a cashless system to set yourself apart from the competition.
Cash may be king a few decades ago, but times are changing. As a business owner, you need to keep up with what’s happening by introducing payment options beyond cash and checks.
