You have to agree that the mirrors in stores are more flattering than the ones at home. How many times have you purchased something at The Gap or JC Penny, which looked great, only to come home and realize it didn’t quite suit you?  You must be wondering, what this has to do with selecting the right technology partner.

While clothes shopping, you have an option to return the item at the store. Luckily, merchants in the consumer world are very forgiving when it comes to our purchases. Unfortunately, the business world is not quite as flexible. We cannot imagine deploying a technology solution and then just “returning” because it did not deliver on the expected results.

PayStream has developed Seven Steps to help you supercharge your vendor evaluation process and help you select the right provider the first time around so you don’t have to deal with the “returns” conundrum:

Building a…

Did you know that each Starbucks store offers almost 70 different types of beverages? Order a Blended Crème Frappucino at a Starbucks and don’t be surprised if they ask if you want to make that a Double Chocolate Chip, a Tazo Green Tea, a Strawberries-and-Crème, or one of five other types of Blended Crème Frappucino. It’s all about choices, and where there is consumer demand, there are bound to be options.

Consumers today are bombarded with numerous choices when shopping for, and we have to admit that it has become a way of life. It is not surprising, therefore, that consumers not only demand a range of products and services, but also a variety of options when it comes time to pay the bill. They are also looking for convenient options to make payments, as well as control over the frequency and timing of the transactions.

These three aspects – choice, convenience…

“Build and they will buy,” was Henry Ford’s mantra in the early 1900’s when he introduced his first horseless carriage, the Model T. He built, and consumers eagerly lapped up the cars as soon as they came off the assembly line. But today, more than a century later, the days of Ford’s Model T are long gone.

Biller organizations – utilities, telecom, credit cards, mortgage companies and others that bill consumers on a recurring basis – can no longer be confident that all they have to do is provide easy and convenient electronic options for bill payments and their customers will adopt them. Results of a Billing and Collections Survey by PayStream Advisors, a Charlotte, NC-based research and consulting company, validate this fact.

The survey revealed that biller organizations were forging ahead on the automation curve – with 74 percent of survey respondents offering an electronic option when it was time to…

The word “outsourcing” is still taboo in many finance and accounting circles. For many people, outsourcing conjures up images of large scale lay-offs and your friends and neighbors out of work. Or worse still, if the outsourcing mantra takes over your company, you could be the one looking for another job. As Harry Truman said “it’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.” We would like to ensure that there is nothing for employees to worry about when an organization has outsourcing on its agenda. Though it might sound like an oxymoron, outsourcing could, in fact, be the result of a company’s growth, rather than a downsizing effort.

A company that is growing rapidly might investigate outsourcing accounts payable functions to keep up with its growing invoice volume, instead of adding additional in-house full-time employees. Or a company might want to leverage the…

Electronic procurement – or e-procurement as it was known during the heydays of the dotcom era, when it was fashionable to use the “e” word with everything – has experienced an interesting lifecycle. In the e-procurement space, organizations have seen everything from hype to horror and now acceptance and even growth. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, owing to the maturation of Internet technologies and the astronomical growth of the Web to conduct business, almost every organization has “automation” on its corporate agenda, and e-procurement appeared to be a good place to start.

A plethora of procurement automation solutions cropped up in the marketplace and organizations were rushing to implement these in the hope of achieving tremendous cost savings, enhanced spend managed capabilities and improved supplier relations. Unfortunately, not every adopter of e-procurement saw the anticipated benefits materialize. The biggest stumbling block faced by these early adopters was their inability…

Until recently, automation efforts in the accounts payable area were focused on invoice and payment management and the operational benefits that technology delivers – cost containment and productivity enhancement. However, all this is changing. Innovative financial managers are now recognizing AP automation as an area that offers significant strategic benefits as well - the ability to accelerate invoice processing to enhance discount capture, strengthen working capital positions and build stronger trading partner relationships.

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Over the years, Web invoicing solutions have emerged to facilitate external exchange of transaction-related information and funds between buyers and suppliers. On the other hand, front-end imaging and workflow solutions have evolved to meet organizations’ internal needs around invoice receipt and management. But Web invoicing and front-end imaging solutions both have the same ultimate goal - eliminate paper from transactions. They simply have evolved from different starting points.

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