SMB Series: A simple, secure way to boost cash flow in your business

By Tom Hyde, Head of SMB -  DocuSign APAC

Keen to improve cash flow within your business? Check out this article that I recently wrote for Inside Small Business, which gives you two simple strategies to get on top of cash flow. Here, we’ll take more of a deep dive into how DocuSign Payments could work for you.

The importance of getting paid

As I noted in the Inside My Small Business article, cash flow is a huge concern for small business owners. One in two business owners rate it as their top concern[1]; and 65 per cent of businesses experience payment delays or failure to collect payment[2].

Without a steady stream of income, how can you invest in innovation and growth? Or, at a more fundamental level, how can you pay your staff and suppliers? In short, you can’t.

Enter DocuSign Payments. It’s a feature of DocuSign that we’re pretty proud of – mainly because it exists to help small businesses like yours to collect payments at the time a customer signs an agreement, eliminating the need for you to chase money.

Integration with leading payment gateways

DocuSign Payments is ideal for any instance where you need to collect payment at the same time that you’d be getting a customer to sign for something. For example, insurance premiums, rental agreements, donations, security deposits, tax returns, the list goes on.

We work with the two leading payment gateways on the market, Stripe and Authorize.net. For the uninitiated, a payment gateway is something you need to accept online payments from customers – it’s a secure service that sends their payment details to the payment networks for processing.

We’ve developed robust integrations with Stripe and Authorize.net. To set things up, you’ll need to open an account with one of these payment gateways and connect your DocuSign account to it. Then, whenever you need to collect payment as part of sending out an agreement to be signed, you can simply drag and drop a ‘payments’ tag to the agreement.

Smoother customer experience

From the customer’s end, the DocuSign Payments experience is seamless. Once they have added their eSignature to the document, a payment window pops up requesting their payment before the document can be sent back. In other words, they have to pay up, then and there.

But payment is easy. They don’t need to post cheques or log into their own online banking. Rather, depending on the payment gateway you use, they can pay by credit card, debit card, Apple Pay or Android Pay:

  • Stripe: Credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Android Pay
  • net: Credit cards, debit cards

Once the transaction is complete, the customer will receive a confirmation of payment which they can then file for their records. It’s quick, easy and secure; your customers will love it.

To learn more about DocuSign Payments, watch this .

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[1] Smart Company Reader Survey 2018

[2] DocuSign Market Research 2016

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