Offset your postage costs with AR automation

The inflation rate has been over 8% for most of 2022, making it difficult for businesses in all sectors to keep costs down. So they’re forced to increase the price of their own goods, producing a vicious cycle where their customers – consumers or other businesses – are forced to foot the bill.

Even as the Fed and other government regulators try to put a leash on inflation, the United States Postal Service has filed notice with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) of price increases to take effect in July 2022. The proposal — which is still pending approval — would raise the price of a First-Class Mail Forever stamp from 58 cents to 60 cents, an approximately 6.5% increase. 

How much more expensive will postage become for businesses?

The complete list of increases:

While a few cents here and there doesn’t seem like a lot, for businesses that rely on the postal service for invoicing, marketing, or other services, it can quickly lead to thousands of dollars in additional operating costs. Just look at your current postage costs, add 6.5% to that outlay, and calculate the pain it’ll bring to your financial forecasts.

When you have to adapt to major increases in postage costs, it can affect more than today’s bottom line.  It can also limit your flexibility and ability to innovate and scale in the coming years.

Sparing yourself the pain of rising postage costs

One way to offset rising postage costs in 2022 is to switch your customers to electronic billing and payment channels. Digitizing your invoicing and payment processing operations means you and they can evade the pain of postage rate hikes. The best solutions make it incredibly easy for your customers to view and pay invoices electronically. Which is a distinct improvement over sending out paper invoices throughout the month and waiting on payment via snail mail.

Not only will that reduce your postage costs, but it helps meet clients on their terms and makes it simpler for them to pay you. Removing the postal service from the equation can mitigate or even eliminate slow, manual processes and prevent cash flow slowdowns by accelerating your order-to-cash (O2C) cycle.

In addition to cutting postage costs, an AR automation solution (like the one offered by Billtrust) also helps you efficiently market and steer customers through the order-to-cash cycle, requiring less oversight from your AR team. When your employees spend less time chasing customers to use electronic invoices and payments, they can spend more time improving processes, innovating for the future, and helping your company grow through difficult economic times.

Preparing for a paperless payments world

Billtrust accelerates your O2C cycle by streamlining orders, invoicing, customer payments and collections, and offers a cash app to service any customer’s preferred method of payment. Plus, our Business Payments Network gives you accounts receivable (AR) team global reach that no other provider can match.  

It’s a set of integrated solutions built to give you a head start in a modern, paperless business world in which companies increasingly prefer to make B2B payments electronically. And one in which postage is becoming prohibitively expensive.

Did you know Billtrust provides a dedicated team to help convert your customers’ invoices and payments to your digital platform? They’ll help educate your internal teams to create a digital-first culture, design and create effective marketing campaigns, and implement best practices with digital-first settings in your software. Customers that worked with our team of experts in 2021 increased their electronic invoicing rate by an average of 97% and electronic payments by an average of 37%, accelerating cash flow for their company. 

With inflation continuing to cause problems for businesses all over the world, rising postage costs are just dubious icing on that very unwelcome cake. But you can mitigate these cost increases and keep your operating budget under control by moving to world-class AR automation.