How much is non-integrated payment processing costing your practice?

The average time to complete a transaction using an integrated payment processing system is just two minutes.¹ With a non-integrated payment solution, the time taken stretches to almost three times as long. While six minutes may not seem like a long time, it can really add up over the course of a day full of visits.

Plus, if you’re at the front desk at a busy veterinary practice or a client in a rush to another appointment, six minutes can seem like an eternity. It’s easy to understand why clients and staff alike can become very frustrated with inefficient payment systems.

An average veterinary practice processes around 500 credit card transactions each month.² If your practice is using a non-integrated payment system, this works out to 50 hours each month spent on taking payments.

Remove the frustration of long waits in your clinic

The simple step of integrating payments into your practice management software would save an average practice 33 hours each month based on the two minutes per transaction standard. That’s just over an hour of valuable time each day your team can win back to use in more productive ways than handling slow and frustrating manual payments.

Think about the positive ripple effect this would have on your clients, too. Not only does each client have to wait for an average of six minutes while your team processes their payment, but there’s also the cumulative effect of waiting for others who were in the line before them. The busier your clinic, the longer they wait.

While these are common examples of the impact of non-integrated payments, there are other areas of your business that are potentially suffering, too.

Payment reconciliation

Manually reconciling payments and accounts is also a time-consuming task. Balancing numerous credit card batches from several machines is tedious and time-consuming.

If, for example, your credit card payments don’t match up—say your Mastercard^® report is $100 up and your American Express^®  report is $100 down—you have to go through your records to find out where the error occurred, and then correct it both in your software and your credit card report.

But with an integrated payment processing system, transactions are automatically recorded, almost completely removing the opportunity for these kinds of errors to occur.  Not only do you get greater visibility and the capacity to create more-up-to-date and accurate reports, but you also save time by not having to correct the errors too.

Incidental errors

With a non-integrated payment processing system, your staff must juggle more than one system, increasing the opportunity for errors. An integrated payment processing system helps to reduce incidental errors, such as a client being charged incorrectly or an invoice being associated with the wrong patient. Again, working through these errors and fixing them is a time-intensive exercise, which is bound to frustrate both clients and staff.

Here’s another example of how the intelligence of an integrated solution could benefit your practice: even if a staff member enters a transaction and selects the wrong payment type, an integrated payment system can recognize this and record the transaction against the right card type. These small wins can add up over time if they’re repeated, which is often the case in a busy practice.

Missed payment mistakes

Another issue solved by using integrated payment systems is improperly credited missed payments. This type of mistake can easily occur if a client’s card is declined or if there was a problem while processing the transaction. When a system isn’t integrated, it’s easy to miss these errors and mark the invoice as paid, only to realize at the end of the day that the payment didn’t go through after all.

Rather than manually going through each transaction to match the payment to the invoice amount to find out where the payment was missed, an integrated system picks up a declined payment or processing error. Often, this happens while the client is still in your clinic, so payment can be attempted again right away.

If a missed payment error isn’t picked up until the end of the day, the unprocessed payment will immediately notify you when you run your end-of-day reporting. It can then be quickly associated with the patient record, making it much easier to follow up.

Automating client payments

Integrated payment processing systems also make it easier to take and reconcile regular payments from your clients. This is a great feature if you run wellness plans or have other payment plans in place for your clients.

An integrated payment processing system will automatically attribute the payment from a client to the correct patient record and keep your financial records up to date. Again, any missed or declined payments are easily identified in reporting, allowing you to contact the client to address any issues.

¹ Covetrus internal research.

² Ibid.