For ELMs, local authorities and charitable organisations operating society lotteries, it’s common to use Bureaus and other third party suppliers to manage collections and prize payments.
But did you know that there can be many advantages to investing in an automated payments platform and moving your payments and collections processes in-house?
1. Maximise returns
Over time, transaction fees can really mount up as your supporter base grows.
AccessPay presents no transaction fees, no hidden costs and just one annual subscription fee; which means you’re left with more funds in the pot to dish out to good causes.
2. Increase control
Relying on third party providers to keep your payments function running smoothly can come with added risks around security and reliability.
Automating the process in-house via an intuitive payments platform centralises all your payments and collections. Plus, customisable workflows let you decide who does what, when and how; giving you the visibility you need to improve overall cost and control.
3. Speed up payment processing
It can take up to a month for collections to start receiving funds when using a third party provider. That’s 10 working days to set up a Direct Debit, and another week before collections can start being processed. Meaning you could be missing out on potential income for the first week of collections.
By bringing the process in-house, you are in control of your own scheduling; with 10 working days to set up a Direct Debit and the minimum required time frame of submitting a direct debit to receiving the fund reduced to the Bacs standard of 3 days. In total, that’s 13 days from set-up to collection, meaning the process takes half the time.
4. Get Accurate Bacs reports
Manually collecting Bacs reports is not only time consuming, but can lead to missing reports and often results in inaccurate data collection.
By automating your payments process with AccessPay, you can benefit from the automatic download of Bacs reports, so you’re always equipped with the most recent Bacs Reports as soon as they’re available for reconciliation.
5. Security
When you hand over your payments to a third party provider, their security is out of your control.
By bringing the process in-house with a platform like AccessPay, you can reduce risk by automating file uploads via a secure sFTP connection within an encrypted channel.
The AccessPay platform also benefits from user access controls such as two-factor authentication and segregation of duties to help you safeguard approvals and effectively separate your processes for prize payments and collections.
6. Minimise your workload
Bringing payment processing in-house doesn’t necessarily mean it will take up any more of your time.
By choosing an automated payments platform like AccessPay, you can seamlessly integrate with key back-office systems, such as lottery management systems. Plus, intuitive workflows take care of the file transformation process. So all you need to focus on is approving and reconciling your payments and collections. The rest of the process is automated.
If you work for any type of organisation fundraising through lotteries, you can achieve all of this without adding to your workload by investing in an automated payments processing platform like AccessPay. To find out how we can help you with your lottery payment operations, click here.
