Rose Report: Issue 24

RFSePay: An E-Payment Solution by Accountants, For Accountants

It’s been almost a decade since electronic payment became commonplace among consumers: 2006 was the first year that as many bills were paid electronically as were paid with paper checks.

Despite the advantages in terms of cost reduction, businesses have been slow to embrace e-payment. With an electronic solution, there’s no longer a need for checks, envelopes, and stamps, and employees are freed from processing all that paper. The approval process can be simplified—no more attaching documentation to a check that has to be signed manually. In addition, payment records are stored digitally.

Yet many companies still haven’t made the switch to e-payments. The delay isn’t because of security fears—after all, many executives pay their personal bills online.

Many of the e-payment products on the market use a process that is bolted on to the standard disbursement process, similar to a company’s current process for issuing a check. Additionally, many companies maintain paper checks as their primary disbursement process, while ACH’s occur as a secondary process — and that “creates more headaches,” Rose says. At the same time, not all vendors will want to be paid electronically, meaning that a company can find itself committed over the long-term to an awkward payment system where paper checks and the e-payments process aren’t integrated.

Rose Financial Services has created RFSePay, an e-payment solution that is “an electronic payment system designed by accountants, for accountants,” Rose says.

The combination of RFSPayments and RFSePay allows companies to set their own control environment, ensuring proper approval. Bills are aggregated into payment batches that are approved electronically, with all documentation part of the web-based system. RFSePay “has a single process,” Rose says. All vendors that have signed up for e-payments receive their payment electronically via ACH. Otherwise, the same system issues electronic checks that are mailed to the vendor. All the transactions are in same process and the same batch, resulting in a single debit, simplifying bank reconciliation.