How to Know When You've Outgrown Your Small Business Banking Relationship

Your business is growing. Maybe you’ve added more staff. Perhaps your financial operations have become more complex over the years with a more robust balance sheet. You may benefit from a more sophisticated banking relationship to help safely optimize how invoices, bills and payments are received and paid. If your organization has been in a growth mode, now may be the perfect time to reevaluate your banking partnership. Let’s take a look at how you manage your financial operations. Then we’ll give you the tools to review the capabilities of your banking partner. How do they measure up?

Let’s start with an evaluation of your company’s current banking habits. Check all that apply to your business.

• Is your company manually managing over 50 wires, ACH transfers or bill payment transactions in a month? 
• Does your company issue a high volume of checks but only reconciles accounts monthly?
• Is it important for company decision-makers to know your daily cash position?
• Does your company receive over 200 payments monthly?
• If your business holds high account balances, are you leveraging liquidity management strategies to earn interest or offset banking fees?  

If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, you may be ready for a change in banking partners. Upgrading your banking relationship to include treasury management services may be the next step in streamlining your day-to-day accounting operations. 

The Benefits of a Better Fit

If your company has high average monthly account balances, high volume of monthly transactions, and/or excess liquidity, a small business checking account may not be the best fit. The limited online banking services it provides may not be robust enough to meet your business needs. Treasury Management services paired with a commercial checking account can help your business move faster, stay informed, improve cash flow, and reduce fraud. They can also help you maximize on idle balances through automation, customized reporting, and liquidity management tools. 

If you notice an increase of transaction volume in the form of wires, ACH payments, electronic bill payments, and checks of over 50 transactions a month, this may be a good indicator that it’s time for a switch. Often as businesses experience rapid growth, the old way of manually processing payments can lead to accounting errors, reconciling discrepancies, repetitive tasks, and fraud.

Efficiency 

As part of the suite of treasury management services, digital receivables management tools let your business securely scan and transmit digital check images for same day ledger credit. Tools such as Remote Deposit Capture and Mobile Deposit can help you expedite the availability of funds in your account by enabling you to deposit checks immediately upon receipt.   Merchant Services solutions can provide further efficiencies for your receivables by allowing you to receive payments from credit and debit cards.  

Simplifying how your company makes payments through the use of repetitive templates for recurring payments means you can pay your customers and vendors  with greater ease and dependability, all leading to better control you’re your business.     

Visibility

As your transactions increase, so does your need for fraud protection and risk mitigation. The ability to flag discrepancies for decision, manage multiple users, customize reports, and multi-level payment approvals are all benefits of Treasury Management services. 

Treasury Management tools such as Positive Pay provide verification of checks you’ve issued.  This automated fraud detection tool matches the check number, dollar amounts and even the payee name for each check presented for payment against those authorized or issued by your company. Discrepancies are presented to the customer to approve or disapprove.  Other services such as ACH Blocks and Filters provide you with protection against unauthorized electronic debits against your accounts. 

As you outgrow the small business model, you may need different accountants or administrators for daily operations, reporting and reconciliation, and activation of transactions, you may now need to provide multiple team members with access to the company’s banking. With the multi-user capabilities available through treasury management services, you can designate credentials and give access authority to multiple users. The ability to segregate duties across users and establish multiple layers of approvals for payments provides increased security without sacrificing any visibility. 

In addition to the user management, you will benefit from the additional features and flexibility that come with treasury management services. These include extended cut-off times and more flexible transaction and dollar daily limits. You’ll have multiple file format options to receive files from your bank to help automate your account reconciliation process. And you can set up customized, real-time reporting to manage not only your daily cash position but have the visibility to forecast and budget for your future.

The Axos Difference

At Axos Bank, we know that as your business grows, the expansion of your banking platform and services can be daunting. That is why we offer a higher level of customer service. Our treasury management customers are assigned dedicated relationship managers and treasury management sales officers who are savvy in business and available when you need them. They understand financial functions, velocity of funds, and what needs to happen as your business grows. You get a dedicated servicing team who knows your day-to-day operations and provides a personalized level of service. So, when it’s time for you to make the jump to treasury management services, give Axos Bank a call.

How to Know When You have Outgrown Your Small Business Banking Relationship

This blog post was published by Axos Editorial Team on October 7, 2020 and last updated on October 7, 2020.