Veterinary clinics have navigated changing social norms, adding practices including telehealth, curbside servicing, and fear-free experiences. Time-saving and productive payment acceptance processes are a must to meet changing client behaviors and evolving payment methods.
The best payment acceptance solutions for in-person and remote servicing allow you to take payments anywhere, reduce bottlenecks at checkout, save time for your front desk staff, and get paid faster.
Below we cover five best practices to help you streamline operations and back-office tasks by using a secure, cloud-connected solution.
Payment Processing Demo
Schedule 15 minutes with a payments expert
Get a customized PayJunction product walk-through
Understand requirements and pricing
Determine your SAVINGS!
5 Ways to Save Time and Boost Payment Productivity
- Integrate Payments
Integrated payment solutions create a unified platform that allows payment information to flow directly between your practice management system, website, or back-office software while streamlining end-of-day processes and reporting. The result is increased productivity, a better customer experience, and more time to devote to tasks like preparing exam rooms or sending appointment reminders. Learn how this veterinary hospital became more efficient by streamlining payment acceptance.
Staff can quickly accept in-person payments and telephone orders, recharge a card on file, send a digital invoice, manage recurring payment plans, and issue refunds. In addition to debit and credit cards, customers can pay with a mobile wallet or via low-cost ACH bank-to-bank transfers.
PayJunction can help you integrate payment features within any cloud-based software platform in minutes. It can be as simple as mapping fields using our free Chrome extension. Purchase information including customer ID, invoice numbers, and amounts are easily paired with your existing software. Once approved, transaction information automatically flows into your software to be stored with customer records. And end-of-day accounting takes just a few clicks.
- Go Digital
Paper processes are time-consuming, inefficient and wasteful. While most vet clinics have upgraded to cloud-based practice management systems, many still rely on old payment systems that support paper invoices, receipts and batch reports. Not only is this time-consuming for staff, but it often results in keying errors and a less-than-ideal customer experience.
Digital invoices are a quick and easy way for customers to pay for goods and services. Recipients receive an email, open the link, click to pay, and enter payment details in a secure online form.
Instead of filing away every paper receipt, you can use a cloud-based payment system to store digital receipts and secure payment details linked to customer records. Instead of digging through a filing cabinet for a past transaction, you can search for a receipt with a few clicks by using a client’s name, transaction date or even a pet’s name. - Streamline End-of-Day and Bank Reconciliation
The time spent consolidating sales receipts, printing batch reports, preparing deposits, and reconciling credit card activity with your Veterinary Management software, bank deposits, and processing statements adds up.
Your batch-out process can be simplified and automated using an integrated payments solution or a cloud-connected Virtual Terminal. Instead of printing and collecting long batch receipts at the end of each day, batch reports are automatically logged in your software or Virtual Terminal. Even better, since all payments are consolidated in one management console, your office can simplify end-of-day procedures, reconciliation and reporting across departments and locations.
And when it comes to bank account reconciliation, you don’t have to wait until the end of the month to receive processing and bank statements in the mail. You’ll gain real-time visibility into deposit reports to match with bank records.
- Gain Business Insights
Getting insight into your practice’s performance over time can require hours of preparation. Even understanding it daily requires manual work, which wastes time for office management.
Proactively analyzing financial data to gain insights into customer trends and performance metrics across departments and locations helps veterinary practitioners make better-informed decisions. PayJunction's built-in reporting software tallies your sales data, providing meaningful financial reports that empower your business.
A Virtual Terminal that produces custom reports showcasing the practice’s performance is an essential tool for measuring success and planning for the future. You can analyze results by day, week, month or year; reports can be broken down by account for multi-location practices or larger practices with departments such as internal medicine, critical care, diagnostic imaging, and boarding and daycare services.
Use year-over-year reports to compare the current and previous year’s performance and to implement strategies, services and promotions to drive value in slower seasons.
- Manage From Anywhere
Running a veterinary practice is hectic. On top of various animals coming and going within the office, you have to manage day-to-day tasks, confirm patient check-in and checkout, maintain patient records, hire and train staff, and oversee payments. Work days don’t always end when they should, but that doesn’t mean you must remain in the office to check in and perform tasks.
A cloud-connected solution allows you to log in and manage payments from any browser-connected device. You can track each payment from checkout, to research, to reconciliation. Add or remove users and check on performance at any location, any time, from anywhere. The ability to manage a multi-location practice through one single platform simplifies bookkeeping.
Opting for an innovative, reliable payment solution delivers a better customer experience, improves operations and scales to meet your needs.
Improve Your Vet Practice’s Payment Productivity.
What inefficiencies are looking to remedy at your vet practice? Tell us below.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in January 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and accuracy.
