Bacs has been around for 45 years now. Despite this duration, and its track record of being speedy, easy and secure, bacs software has not been universally adopted by companies and other organisations. It tends to be the smaller outfits who refuse the longest, for obvious reasons. However, instead of making bacs payments, many of these are still paying their bills with cheques or, in some cases, even with cash. This brings up a number of problems and makes for inefficient and even risky practices.
Times are changing, and now the vast majority of financial transactions happen in the virtual arena. The reasons for this are different, but speed and security are repeating ones. It is very convenient to transfer money with bacs, and because it includes multiple layers of safety measures it is very secure; should you – against all odds – run into a problem, you will almost certainly be insured and protected from any financial fallout, unless the issue is unarguably your fault.
Bacs transfers take a maximum of three working days to finish, but the new FPS (faster payments system) is almost instant, and costs no more. Effectively, when people talk about bacs nowadays, they are using it as a encompassing term for electronic transfers, including FPS.
All of this is important for organisations, even the smaller ones who are relying on cheques and cash. (Although there was an outcry at the time, quite recently the banks suggested that they would be eradicating cheques within the foreseeable future – reflecting the low regard in which they hold them…) No organisation, large or small, wants to have significant quantities of cash on the premises. Furthermore, cheques are time-consuming to complete, require counter-signing, and you have no idea when they will be cashed – which can cause cash-flow headaches.
So, if you haven’t already adopted bacs payments for your organisation, now is a good time. So many other outfits use bacs that it smooths the process of making payments – allowing you to budget more easily, and to allow time to other areas of your business that are more important. Everything can be automated, and bacs software can even be integrated with your accounts package, streamlining things further. Bacs is safe, secure, fast, and saves you time and money. At a time when every pound is important, this cannot be a bad thing.
Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.
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