A really good financial practice in this emerging digital economy is automating your bills. In this article, we discuss advantages of, and the best tips for bill automation.
What Is Bill Automation?
Bill automation is the process of scheduling a money transfer on a predetermined date to pay a recurrent bill. It is a system that enables you to automate the routine, but quite often complex, billing functions. The goal of an automated billing system is to deliver greater efficiency by streamlining your billing processes, allowing you to save both time and money.
You can authorise an automatic bill payment to be made using your debit card or savings. The amount due for the payment is collected automatically on the due date according to your payment schedule.
Automated payments can be used to pay different types of bills. For example, you may be able to use automatic bill payments to pay your:
– Electricity Bills
– DSTV Subscription
– Mobile data plans
– Recurrent Transfers
Benefits Of Bill Automation
Bill automation is a process that boasts of several benefits. Running an automatic bill system helps to:
– Save time and resources: A recurring billing platform saves you time spent on processing payments on a recurring basis because these tasks are all automated.
– Improve accuracy of transactions: Recurring manual billing processes increase the risk of human error and can lead to several mistakes and inaccuracies. With automation, customer information or subscription plans only need to be entered into the system once.
– Provide better insight on subscription to services: Every company wants to know what’s happening with their business behind the scenes and what the data points to. Easily accessible reports allow you to see what’s working and what isn’t.
– Build better relationships between businesses and their customers because of the seamless process: A recurring billing platform allows customers to receive automated email notifications once payments are received, which is a great way to enhance customer relationships.
– Enhance security: Automated processes provide better security for customer data, and this ultimately leads to heightened consumer confidence in the business.
Factors To Consider Before Deciding To Take Up Bill Automation
As advantageous as bill automation is, the truth is that it’s not meant for everyone. It is important to put a few factors into consideration before integrating this process into the operation of a business. These factors include:
– Length of time it takes to process transactions
– Ease of identifying pending/overdue transactions
– Ease of effecting upgrades or downgrades to transactional systems
– Access to real-time data to aid decision-making
There are also certain situations where bill automation would be counterproductive. Setting up an automatic billing system that functions monthly would not be viable or logical if:
– Your income is irregular
– You have lost your job
– You have a track record of being reckless with spending.
With respect to paying bills, Paga allows you to set up recurring payments. This means that you can set up your account in a manner that it will be debited a specific amount at a specified time of the month for a particular service. It’s like a bank’s standing instructions, but for e-wallets. For instance, you can have your account debited for the sum of N10,000 on the 26th day of each month for electricity bills.
A recurring payment is designed to take away the burden of initiating a regular payment while ensuring you do not miss the payment. It is simple to set up. To do this:
– Log into your Paga account
– Select “recurring payments” from the list of services
– Create a new recurring payment
– Select the service you want to create a recurring payment for
– Fill out the details of the recipient/beneficiary
– Set up the schedule and fill all required fields
– Review the details and confirm the transaction.
When you set up recurring payments, you are authorizing Paga to debit your Paga Account, bank account, or saved debit/credit card, for the specified amount at the specified period. All transactions are final. If your Paga account or bank account is not sufficiently funded or your debit/credit card is declined at the time of the transaction, the transaction will fail.
You can also permit a 3rd party to setup a subscription recurring payment to debit your Paga Account or saved bank account or debit/credit card. All transactions are final. If your Paga Account or bank account is not sufficiently funded or your debit/credit card is declined at the time of the transaction, the transaction will fail.
In conclusion, bill automation is the way to go. It makes life a lot easier, and you don’t have to worry about remembering every single payment you have to make at various times of the month. Modern technology thrives on ease, and bill automation is one of the systems that define this.
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