Business

Small Businesses- Know Your Payment Options

Written by Chloe Harwood

One top way of boosting sales and to ensure small businesses enjoy a steady stream of income is by offering various payment options. By ensuring that your business is offering a wide range of payment options you are providing your clients with choice, in turn making sure that you can win every sale possible. As the payment options in businesses change and grow it is important to understand all the different payment options available in order to determine which one best suits you and your business needs.

Cash

Cash is, and always has been a popular option for small business as a way of avoiding large tax payouts. Whilst this is tempting to many businesses, particularly in tricky financial moments, there are of course dangers that come hand in hand with this approach. Avoiding taxes can put your business in danger of being targeting by tax audits and can wind up costing you more if you need to pay out hefty fines for tax evasion. Therefore caution is necessary when approaching cash transactions.

Checks

Are you surprised to even find this on a list in 2017? Well, yes but you would be surprised how many businesses are still using checks in business transactions as this payment option does still offer benefits to small business. Whilst they are still popular the greatest risk associated with checks is of course whether the buyer has sufficient funds in their account to honour the amount written on the check. Bouncing checks therefore is an understandable concern for this type of payment method, so it is advisable to be particularly savvy when doing business transactions with checks.

Online Payments

Now, we are getting into the more modern, and slightly more complicated payment methods in business. Online payments are certainly the future of of business transactions, but they too have both advantages and disadvantages. Online payments can offer businesses the cheapest and fastest ways to send and receive money so it is well worth researching the different options available.

Bitcoin is of course a huge player in the world of online business and ecommerce but it can take a while to get your head around how using bitcoin as a financial currency can benefit your business. Understanding bitcoin cyber currency and ethereum price can take a little time, however blockchain technology is pipped to be be an extremely innovative way for companies to do business with each other.

Credit Cards

Last, but by no means least, our ‘flexible friend’, the reliable credit card. This is currently the most common method of payment next to cash-in-hand, however there are certain disadvantages associated with this method also. The fees involved with credit card transactions can rack up quite a bill with businesses who are regularly using credit cards as their main method of payment. Whether your credit card company charges individual transaction fees or incidental fees, you should be looking at the best credit card provider, with the best package available for the individual needs of your company.

About the author

Chloe Harwood