Electronic billing has become a part of the worldwide transfer to online. The COVID-19 lockdown boosted the process, but the overall forecasts say that the digital billing and invoicing market will keep thriving, regardless of the situation with the pandemic.

E-billing is an effective way to optimize corporate finances and make customer communications more convenient. It has several other significant benefits and remains an integral part of going paperless in the business processes.

In the article, we will summarize the advantages of e-billing and give answers to FAQs about digital billing systems and PDF rendering tools for e-billing implementation.

E-billing in 2021 and Beyond

E-billing is a part of economic growth and the differentiator of a country’s current economic state. In developing countries, the market share of digital billing and online shopping is still relatively low. But for sure, it’s not for long, and developing handy digital billing systems is a need for businesses of any size and focus worldwide.

E-billing implementation positively impacted small and medium-sized businesses. Under the COVID-19 pandemic conditions, the ability to use payment gateways for credit cards and connect websites with online payment systems became a survival factor for micro and small businesses in many countries. A study by Visa in Mexico shows that average monthly revenue increased by 22 percent after accepting digital payment systems.

Growing access to smartphones caused the 43% increase in payments over mobile money.

Cutting-edge technology and the desire to make transactions secure empowers the year’s trends of digital payments:

• Using biometric data for user authentication replaces passwords and creates safer conditions for digital payments. The method positively impacts customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.
• Temporary codes instead of credit cards is a more secure instrument of e-billing due to the new code number for each transaction.
• The prevalence of mobile points of sales. Most of the customers visit online stores and make orders using their mobile devices. The trend is here to stay for many years, so mobile points of sales are indeed trending technology.
• Using smart speakers for payments. With the growth of the home assistants’ market, the speakers are evolving and overtaking new functions, including the digital payment process.
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence for enhanced security. Banks constantly improve the software and make it increasingly resistant to fraud transactions.
• Contactless payments. Crucial in the era of social distancing, payments through NFC modules have achieved the deserved popularity and keep developing.
• And, of course, the mobile wallets. Consisting of different components and sometimes involving different companies to create a single mobile wallet aims to make the digital payment process straightforward and seamless.

What are the Benefits of Digital Billing Systems?

Such growth in the market share of digital payments exaggerates their advantages over paper billing:

• Conservation of resources. Of course, eliminating paper for bills saves millions of trees and millions of gallons of wastewater.
• Customer satisfaction. When one can make a payment in seconds--just by entering the credit card data--they are more likely to place an order.
• A speedy way to pay. Digital payments are faster than offline methods. Many companies estimate the daily sales growth by over 50% due to e-billing implementation.
• Less billing issues. Some digital payment systems can automatically connect to the payer’s bank account to make the regular payments seamless.
• Overall cost reduction. Organizations can save about 11 cents per bill on eliminating paper. Multiplied by the number of transactions, this can result in a considerable amount of money.

Read How to Convert HTML into PDF for Paperless Communications

What are the Risks of Digital Billing Systems?

Though the benefits of digital billing systems are undoubted, online payments are not risk-free. Here are the main two categories of risks:

Risks of e-billing from the customer’s perspective:

• Stolen payment data. Though organizations try to do their best to protect payment gateways, hackers’ tools also evolve. So, the little opportunity of the credit card number, pin code, and CVV being stolen remains.
• Fraud on the side of merchants and financial service providers.
• The difficulty of disputes over the quality of products and services.

Risks of digital billing from the merchant’s perspective.

• Slow financial service providers. Usually, the speed of the digital payment system integrated into the website is proportional to its price. Small businesses keep suffering from the inconveniences unless they invest in quality payment service.
• Payment errors and conflicts. As many processes in digital payment are automated, system errors may impact them. This is especially likely to happen to payments made regularly on an automated basis to many recipients.

Tax evasion is another concern, as electronic payments could be conducted bypassing the legal government-transparent systems.

How to Manage Risks of Digital Billing Systems?

Don’t be disappointed with the risk possibilities. Of course, the measures for reducing these risks already exist, and they are the following:

1. PCI compliance. The Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements to help ensure that all digital payment processes for merchants are secure. This is the way to protect their customers from data breaches.
2. Monitoring the payment activity and recognizing the suspicious signs, such as the difference between billing and shipping addresses, enormous orders, conflicting address information, fake phone numbers, etc.

How Do I Integrate a Payment Gateway to a Website?

In one of the articles, we already gave a comprehensive look at paperless invoicing and billing. Here we’ll answer the most frequently acquired questions connected with integrating digital payment systems into your online resources.

There are three main steps:

1. Get a merchant account from the bank.
2. Get a payment gateway that enables you to get payments in many currencies from all over the world.
3. Protect the payment gateway against fraud.

How to choose the proper digital payment system?

The main question for making a choice is, “How will my customers use the system? Will it be convenient and safe for them?”

So, the main factors are:

• Security of the digital payment system,
• Usability from mobile devices,
• NFC-availability,
• The speed of processing digital payment requests.

What Tools Do I Need to Implement a Digital Payment System?

If you adopt a turnkey digital payment system, use the instructions of the corresponding software provider. Even though it’s a shortcut, such solutions will have limited functionality and won’t be tailored to your business needs.

If you want to customize a digital payments system and achieve maximum automation, use APIs during the implementation. HTML to PDF rendering API is among the must-haves. It enables you to add PDF generation into existing software to create multiple PDF documents in seconds. Without an API, the development of such a solution would take months.

Inkit Render instantly converts HTML content to paperless PDF documents, and you can process an unlimited quantity of files at once.

What’s essential for e-billing, Inkit Render offers robust admin controls that enable organizations to track, log, and retain records of every individual who views or tries to access a rendered document. By using technology from a secure, cloud-based partner, you can spend less time, energy, and money to maintain the digital payment system and document storage.

Try Inkit Render for free to implement e-billing for your business now.