Payment Gateways

Historically, trying to take payments via Credit Card and Direct Debit was a nightmare to setup, and involved lots of re-keying of information between your Telco billing system and Payment Gateway provider, credit checks and endless amounts of paperwork.

For this reason, many start-up Telcos relied heavily on accepting EFT payments only. Whilst EFT to payments have their place, it does make scaling up your Telco business challenging. Right now, you might be only dealing with a small amount of EFT payments, but what happens when you grow? When Telco business scale up, EFT payments can be a nightmare due to the following reasons:

1. The payment isn’t automated – you’re waiting (and hoping) the customer initiates the payment to get the invoice paid in a timely manner

2. Conflicting Amounts – Customers sometimes input the incorrect amount, which leaves invoices either short-paid (which means you have to chase your customers) or over-paid (in which case customers want to request refunds

3. Confusing Reference Numbers – Even though you might have a Customer Reference Number (CRN) listed with your EFT details, it’s not uncommon to see references that just say ‘Phone Bill’ for example, or even a reference number thats internal to them. For those, you might be able to match them on the payor in the statement against your Telco Billing System. But what happens if you have the account name as ‘ACME Pty Ltd’ but the payor on the bank transaction list is ‘Falling Anvil Unit Trust’ – it’s really difficult to connect the dots.

These days, it’s a little bit easier and with PracBill where we can integrate into your existing payment gateway, or if you don’t have one – we can set you up on our preferred payment gateway with minimal fuss. This allows for seamless, auto-allocating transactions that are initiated by you, and so that you’re spending less time trying to chase unpaid debts.