Businesses are losing millions annually due to failed transactions, new research has found.
The report from GoCardless claims that the number is increasing year on year, with businesses that use manual, labour-intensive procedures to chase up and collect cash suffering the worst.
GoCardless survey data has found that enterprise businesses could be losing up to £1m annually and those in the mid-market circa £200k plus. Small businesses could be taking a hit of over £6k a year.
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Payments collected via digital wallets were identified as having the highest failure rate at 12%. These were closely followed by credit and debit cards, at 8.2%, which is nearly three times as high as businesses using optimisation services like those offered by GoCardless.
Improving payments
Duncan Barrigan, Chief Product Officer, GoCardless, said: “Payment failures are widely accepted as an inevitability. We don’t believe this should be the case. They can seriously hurt a business - they are costly and can damage reputation and customer relationships.”
Without embracing new technology, business are spending thousands unnecessarily, with additional financial services costing £140,400, IT £138,800, health and wellbeing £86,400 and utilities £85,200 per annum according to survey data.
Charlie Francis, Founder and Director at Equation Training, an online fitness coaching and personal training business said: “When I was first starting out, I used to have to manually chase payments that failed. Now that I have Success+ in place, it means a process that used to take 2-3 hours a week now doesn’t take me any time at all.”
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