Ep. 37 Get Money Faster – Small Business Payment Processing Hacks

Get Money Faster – Small Business Payment Processing Hacks

Cash flow is the lifeblood of your business. You need to make it EASY for customers to give you money. Torie Mathis and her cohost Sean go over the best ways to collect money and take credit cards for your business.

Whether you want to invoice, take payments on your website, or swipe cards, learn the ins and outs of each option for your business.

We’ll cover:

• How to make it EASY to take payments
  
• Best ways to take credit cards for your business
  
• Stripe vs. Square vs. Paypal Quickbooks vs.
  
• Freshbooks for your business
  
• Kartra and Clickfunnels for products
  
• Big mistakes business make using PayPal
  
• How to add a shopping cart on your website
  
• WooCommerce vs. Shopify
  
• Dangers of using Wix or Squarespace

Mentioned in this episode:
Freshbooks: https://toriemathis.com/freshbooks
Quickbooks: https://toriemathis.com/quickbooks
Kartra: https://toriemathis.com/kartra
Clickfunnels: https://toriemathis.com/clickfunnels
Square: https://squareup.com
Paypal: https://paypal.com
WooCommerce: https://woocommerce.com/
Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION –

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SAF 37

[00:00:00] Torie: Because you have to make it easy for customers to give you money. Right? 

[00:00:07] Sean: Why would you not want it to be easy? To connect money.

[00:00:19] Torie: Hey, Hey, welcome to Smart AF on your host Torie Mathis. We’ve got a great show for you today. So let’s get started. So we get questions from clients all the time about how they can take payments on their website or how they can take credit cards. And I think that this is a huge opportunity that a lot of businesses miss because you need to allow customers to give you money easier.

They want to pay you, make it easy for them. Right, Sean Mathis?

[00:00:47] Sean: Last week, we’re recording one of these. And I got a phone call in the middle of it for an order that I had placed. And then I was getting delivery and installation and not installation, putting it together. They were displays for the museum and so I don’t really have the time to talk to the guy right at that moment.

And I got to pay this additional portion. So I’m thinking, well, you just changed my invoice. And I put my card in there because I paid online through the website. And initially, so I’m thinking. Bill bill me the additional somewhere along the line, we misunderstood or something. And he’s trying to capture my wants me to give me my phone over a credit card member over the phone, except okay.

[00:01:40] Torie: In the middle of something. 

[00:01:42] Sean: I don’t even have it on me and we’re in the middle of something. And like he said, he updated my invoice and emailed it to me so that I have a receipt for it. But. Why wouldn’t you just send me an invoice and let me take care of it when I have time, because now also I have forgotten. So I, we haven’t talked since then. I still haven’t paid him this addition. So he hasn’t collected the money from me. 

[00:02:07] Torie: So, so many businesses do this. Why are you making it so hard?

[00:02:11] Sean: And remember to do it now on Monday to actually get that taken care of. 

[00:02:16] Torie: So when we first started taking credit cards for the business, which was many years ago one of the things that. Was really hard for us is that at the time a lot of the credit card companies had monthly fees like you had to sign up for a monthly account with a credit card processor in order to accept credit cards. Like it was kind of difficult for small businesses to take that extra expense. But nowadays, it’s totally not like that.

It is a totally different world for taking credit cards. Any business can take credit cards. Without monthly fees, whether you were like a crafter that is selling things like one day a month like you can take a credit card. Or if you’re like a huge company that is taking credit cards every day through a slider, like at your register, like you don’t have to have monthly fees and it’s super, super easy.

We have clients also that want to take credit cards on their website. Like all of these things are totally possible and super easy because you have to make it easy for customers to give you money. 

[00:03:19] Sean: Yeah, I buy, would you not want it to be easy? To connect money. 

[00:03:25] Torie: So there’s a few questions that you have to ask yourself, like before you start to do this and figure out who your customers are and how they want to pay you. Do you have like set prices? Do you have set products? Do you want to invoice them? Do you need to be able to have them slide a card? Is it recurring? Like, that’s a huge one for us. That was really big. That was a game changer, I think for our business. Because before I, we had recurring invoicing, which meant that the invoices go out and not only that, like it automatically charges them.

Before we did that, I physically every single month duplicated the invoice every, sent them out a new one. They sent out a check. I went to the bank and cash, the check, like it was so much work. And I know there’s some of you that are still doing that and you don’t have to do that. 

[00:04:20] Sean: Three checks in the mail right now, out of all our clients. And now luckily the. The banks all have mobile deposit. So we eliminated that trip to the bank as well. Even, even though we still have a couple of the checks. 

[00:04:35] Torie: So we have a couple of ways that we accept payments and then quite a few different ways that we have accepted payments for different parts of our business. For example, when the museum had, when we were actually taking payments ourselves, we actually got the full square system. And so we had the square that we slid. There was no monthly charge for that, that could go into like an iPad, which is what we had. And then we had like the big plastic thing. I’m sure you’ve seen it at cafes and stuff like that.

Or you can actually just put it into your phone and then you can slide anybody’s card. 

[00:05:09] Sean: You can’t do that. 

[00:05:10] Torie: They don’t have the little. So you can’t do it on the new iPhone. You’d have to use an iPad. So but super easy and there’s no monthly fee. And I mean, it’s pretty, super safe that they can sign for it. They can get an email receipt and anybody can do that. And whether you do one or you do like 500, like I think it’s pretty cool. And so square is one that I think is good for a lot of different people. 

[00:05:34] Sean: And as an added bonus, Sometimes their email gets stored in there depending on how their bank is set up. Or you can just ask for it as well, since you’re creating a customer profile. 

[00:05:47] Torie: So you can end up building your list at the same time, which is a total win. So that one was a really good thing. I think I had a QuickBooks, one of those little square things before, but they tried to charge me monthly for it.

So I know that there’s some other companies that offer that. So some might be monthly square. Definitely. Isn’t. And so that’s definitely an option if you are in person and want to actually like slide a card. Another thing that we have used, we have used QuickBooks and we have used fresh books, which are both really great for invoicing people.

I do not care for how QuickBooks credit card processing worked. I didn’t like how it came into the bank account. It made a huge, nasty, whole big mess and was taking way too much. So we switched over to fresh books for all of our invoicing, even though we do QuickBooks for our accounting. And so we do kind of have to pay a little bit more, but man, fresh books makes it so worth it, how their invoicing works, how it lets the client keep their credit card in there if they want to.

And that it will just charge them automatically. You can schedule them out really far in advance. So we have some clients that we, they pay us annually for things, and it’ll automatically go out. There’s a really good reporting for what’s coming up. So it’s really easy for us to see how much money we’re going to do every single month coming up for the next 12 months.

We can see past data on recurring invoicing. So for us and how our business model is. Like fresh books worked super duper great. It’s a little tiny bit spendy. But the credit card fees are really low and I think bang for your buck. Like, it’s definitely one of like a tool that I don’t think we could do business without right now.

[00:07:22] Sean: No, just the facts that I can save their credit card information in there and have it all automated. Yeah. So it’s not like they’re signing up for a subscription, like, I’m sure you signed up for a subscription through like PayPal or things like that. It’s a little bit different so that they’re still getting invoiced.

[00:07:39] Torie: It’s just, it’s like auto paying the invoice for them because it’s something that. 

[00:07:43] Sean: And we’ll get the invoice created, sent, paid. 

[00:07:49] Torie: All automatically like it’s for a paper trail, because a lot of the, the subscription things like you just get charged and people don’t get like that type of invoicing thing for it.

[00:07:58] Sean: Like, what the hell is this?

[00:08:02] Torie: So it’s a little bit more, especially if you’re like business to business and people need that paper trail. It’s a really great, great way that you can automate a lot of this and make it easy for everybody. Like I said, make it easy for people to give you money. It’s definitely one of my favorite ones.

But if you want something like that, you want to sell products on your website or you need some type of landing page to sell things, which we do also for our own business. You can use another program something like Kartra is one of my favorite ones. Click funnels also works pretty well. Kartra though, I really like, because not only can you take payments. You also can email through Kartra as well. So you can have it do many different things for you. So you don’t have to have a separate payment processing and a separate landing page in a separate email provider. Like Kartra is one of those like done do it all type of things. I think when we finally signed up for Kartra, I think, I can’t say. Five or six other programs that I was using, trying to like piece all these different pieces of my marketing together. So I think if you want an email provider and to be able to take payments to to charge people for things, it’s, it’s definitely a really great program for the. And then if you want to do more one-off things or you just want to there’s some other ways that you can send invoices a little bit and you want no monthly fee Stripe is actually through like, we have Stripe, but that’s our credit card processor through Kartra.

They have no monthly fee at all. It just takes whatever the fee is through it. And you can actually, I, we have some clients that invoice directly through. Stripe so I know that that is possible. I don’t think it’s keeping like your accounting and reporting and all those kinds of numbers, but if you just Stripe, a lot of times is what is used on the backend for the websites.

When you have a product on there as well, it’s actually. 

[00:09:54] Sean: Getting charged through Stripe 

[00:09:57] Torie: so you don’t actually have to like call your bank and get a credit card processing and like get all this, like this monthly fees and everything like stripe.com. Like you can just be like one-on-one with the credit card process.

And their fees are actually better than we saw with a lot of banks and stuff like that. So that is a way that you can have like a shopping cart on your website can be through like Woo Commerce is a plugin that you can put on a WordPress site so that you could have a shopping cart on your website and then Stripe with.

What they could use to pay for it, or a lot of those same payment processing people use PayPal for it because it makes it really easy that people don’t have to type in their credit card information. PayPal also has no monthly fees. The only thing like we use PayPal for some things is that they put it into your PayPal account and then your, from your PayPal account, it has to go into your bank account. And I know that some weirdness there sometimes. 

[00:10:51] Sean: There’s also like PayPal can be used as a Personal PayPal and then there’s Business PayPal. And when you start doing stuff as a business and PayPal, right. As far as collecting payments and that like, it needs to be formatted correctly or it’s, you’re going to have some, some issues there.

Cause I think PayPal does like friends and family is different than what businesses and 

[00:11:17] Torie: Whether they’re charging fees or not, right. 

[00:11:19] Sean: There’s fees. And then there’s security type stuff. So it’s just like, if you’re, if you’re doing stuff with legitimate, like do it the correct way otherwise. Cause I, I had that issue with a hobby business that didn’t format it correctly and tried to charge me through PayPal and it wound up charging I charged them fees. More than what they had saw. And then they tried to cancel everything and then recharge me and I’m like, no. 

[00:11:55] Torie: I definitely like I have seen PayPal be used. I mean, mine is all a business account and on some of my things, I have PayPal as an option because I know people do like it, but it’s all business. But I think if you’re going to have a lot of money coming through, I have heard some horror stories about PayPal, not releasing funds or like charge backs. If people want their money back. That would be my only concern about like, if you have a lot of money, I don’t know if I would choose PayPal for that. I would definitely do your research on that. I have never heard anybody have any problems with Stripe and Stripe literally like puts it straight in, like straight into your business account. Like it goes straight in rather than like PayPal seems to like, have like its own PayPal holding tank. Like your PayPal account can have money in it.

And then you have to get the money out of your PayPal account into your own account where Stripe just seems to funnel it straight in. Like it’s been just like a day or two and it’s in our bank account. So I think that is a better option possibly, but I would definitely do your research and ask other people again, these are just options that can make it easier for your business and easier for people to give you money.

The other thing is if you want a full on shopping cart, like that is something totally different. Full shopping cart on your website. Like I said before, if you have a WordPress website, you can use blue commerce to build a shopping cart. I have done that. I have done that for clients. It’s a little extensive and I think it’s not user-friendly for non like Cody type people, website, building people.

To do that. I, there are quite a few programs that allow you to do that. Like Shopify, Shopify is easy to set up. There is a monthly fee with it, which can be if you have like their higher turbines, I think it can be a little bit spendy, but if you’re actually selling quite a bit from your website, I think it’s, you know, it’s a part of doing business and I’m not sure what their credit card processing is. They might have it through as part of your whole deal that you have, but you mentioned something else that builds shopping.

[00:13:52] Sean: Like Wix, Wix is a, I think a lot of those tablet website type builder, they all offer their own version of some sort of shopping cart type website or that that’s specifically what they’re for. Just know that’s not going to be the basic level of what they. 

[00:14:11] Torie: I honestly am not a fan of these website builders. These third-party type things. One, the website is not yours. Like if you have your website on Squarespace, Or Wix, or even Shopify, you do not own that website. That website is on theirs. And so they can, if they don’t like what you’re doing, they can just kill your website and it’s gone and you cannot get it back.

And there’s nothing like you can’t Sue them. You can’t do anything like the website is not yours. So do you realize that and a long time ago, you might’ve thought they would never do that? Well, you know what, who the hell knows these days? Eh, some employee of yours might do something that somebody doesn’t like, and they will kill your whole business.

So just know that if you use one of these third-party things, the website is not yours. You do not have a hundred percent control over it, nor do you own the actual website. It can be cut down for any reason and the base level of their websites, which you might look like, oh, it’s pretty inexpensive.

Like there’s a lot of simple things that you are not getting like search engine optimization or different access to different things that you might need. Like, I think it was like adding your pixel, like your Facebook pixel, which allows you to connect your Facebook and stuff to your website. Like you had to be on a higher plan in order to do that. Like, these are simple things that you need to have on your website that some of these website builders don’t just give you and you could be missing out on some things that like some functionality that you really do need for growth. So lots of options for you to choose from.

But just know that it’s not like it was 15 years ago when it was hard to take a credit card or that you had to sign up for some crazy credit card process. These days, it’s really easy for any business to take a credit card so that people can pay you easily. And then you don’t go and charge them fees for using a credit card.

You just work that into your cost of doing business. That is what I say. Don’t make it hard on them. Don’t punish your clients either for using a credit card. It’s just, it’s, you know, you wouldn’t charge them for turning the lights on. You don’t charge them for using a credit card easy either. You need to make it easy, easy, easy, easy for people to give you money.