Every business wants to know how they can save on business expenses. They may hire an expensive consultant to help them trim the fat or trim the sails (whatever expression fits better for your business). But at the end of the day, there are some easy ways to save on business costs right in the most obvious places.
Truth be told, most of them don’t even require hard work. They just involve having the right business partner for payment processing, and leveraging that partnership to your advantage.
Research and Implement Best Practices
With the internet, you can research anything you want to know about yourself and do some comparison shopping between vendors and suppliers. When it comes to payment processing for business, you’ll find that review sites have rated National Processing pretty highly.
Of course, researching best practices goes beyond point of sale terminals. You can take a look at what other business owners are doing to reduce costs and even learn about ways to build a more motivated workforce.
Partner and Outsource
Most businesses outsource at least part of their business operations. The businesses that find the best suppliers for those needs can save money while retaining efficient operations and presenting a quality, customer-facing image. But finding the right balance of price and quality can be tricky—unless you have an industry partner to help you.
Since National Processing works with so many different businesses in the retail, restaurant, and eCommerce verticals, we have a wide range of vetted potential partners who can help you reduce your small business expenses and get the products or services you need.
Whether you’re in the food business and would like to find a cost-effective source of disposable carry-out boxes, or you own a vintage arcade of pinball machines and need a specialized mechanic, National Processing might know of a business that will help you make the perfect pair.
Reduce Inefficiency with Automation
Automation is the way of the future. And while you might not envision replacing your employees with robots—though on some days, you might wish you could—you will certainly want to automate some features of your business, such as recurring payments. If you run a subscription based service with online payments, National Processing can save you time and money.
You can also automate payments to staff, suppliers, vendors, and business partners—and by automating, save on processing fees. If your business is small enough to the point where you are also the HR point person and accountant, this will also save you a huge amount of headaches.
And truth be told, with so many other areas of your business to worry about, automating certain operations of your business might also reduce errors that can occur from juggling too many different tasks.
Check Credit Card Fees
Most small business owners take processing fees as a set-in-stone given. After all, most consumers these days want to pay for things with plastic, so credit card processing is a must-have. But the truth is that not all payment processing solutions are the same.
Between the bank, the card issuer, and the payment processing company, each and every payment made with plastic can really eat away at your profits, especially if the processing fee structure is set up in a way that isn’t favorable to the size of your business, or perhaps if it does not have the flexibility needed by a business with strong seasonal fluctuations.
Check with National Processing and see if we can negotiate better rates and fees with vendors of your choice.
Provide Cash Discounts
Customers and clients always love saving money. Let them know it’s possible with a cash discount program. All you need to do is advertise a price differential in a visible way and indicate the discount on your receipts.
National Processing will take care of the rest. In today’s era of COVID-19 restrictions and best practices, contactless payments are becoming increasingly popular, but that doesn’t mean you have to forgo the notion of cash as king—with our payment processing solutions, you can offer a cash discount and collect debit card payments.
The money you save on the credit card interchange fees can really add up and reduce some of your small business expenses.
A Final Word
As you can see, many of these simple business practices come back to investing a minimal amount of effort and engaging your payment processing partner to help out.
With a partner like National Processing, that end of the arrangement becomes fairly easy, as we’re committed to delivering the best possible customer experience to our partners in every business—and helping them save on business expenses.
