Why Merchant Services Integration with Field Service Management Software Matters

Choosing a merchant services system that integrates with field service management software leads to huge benefits for your business.

You have a lot of choices when it comes to merchant services in the field service vertical, so you should take care to select an option that will best fit your business. In fact, you have so many options, you can probably instantly recall the last time someone reached out to sell you on the latest and greatest low rate. While rates are important (and you should review your statements regularly to make sure you are getting what you agreed to), making your decision based solely on rate might not be the best route to take. Instead, you should look into integrated payment processing with your field service software. This will get you a lot more bang for your buck. 

Why does payment processing integration matter for field service businesses?

Whether you work in HVAC, pool cleaning, plumbing, or any other field service vertical, your business has a lot of moving parts: office staff, field techs, supervisors, work trucks, and warehouses just to name a few. Why add another moving part by having to match up credit card charges to invoices, and then invoices to bank deposits? Integrated processing through your field service management software helps limit all of this waste. 

Benefits for Office Staff

With integrated payment systems, transactions are automatically entered into the software and applied to the ledger. This can reduce costly human error and improves efficiencies and cost-savings for your business. Integrated payment systems speed up cash flow and put more money in your account. Payment integration reduces the time that you have to spend going through batches, checking against deposits, and matching up invoices. Your time is valuable, and payment integration into your field service management system gives you a lot of it back to focus on the tasks that actually drive your bottom line.

Benefits for Field Techs

Payment integration in your field service management software not only saves you or your bookkeepers time, it saves your service techs time as well. With the ability to take payments on the job without constantly flipping back and forth from a payment application to their field service software, integrated processing represents a big win for your front line staff. Integrated payment processing allows the field service software to push the balance due into the payment field so your technicians can’t make any pricing errors that can lead to costly chargebacks and refunds. 

Benefits for Customers

When you use integrated payment processing with your field service software, your customers win as well. They get the assurance that they are paying for the services they received at the proper rate, and they feel an added level of security when making a payment at the time of service that everything lives in one place. Their appointment, work order, any forms or checklists, invoices, and payments are all generated and completed in one streamlined system. No more signing off on a job, then going into a separate application to make a payment. Integrated processing allows for a seamless customer experience from start to finish.

Choosing a Merchant Service

When looking to start taking credit cards as a form of payment, or looking to change your merchant services provider for your field service business, don’t let the conversation start and stop at the rate. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice the features and functionality of integrated processing to get a low processing rate. Choosing the right merchant services provider for your business, employees, and customers means choosing one that integrates with field service management software.

The value of integration carries a lot more weight than a couple tenths of a percent, and in a lot of cases you can get PCI compliant integrated processing in your field service software at a competitive rate as well. Your time and your employees’ time is money, and it is far more than valuable in the long run than a handful of basis points.

Payment Processing in Smart Service

Smart Service has the solution! With the partnership between Smart Service and payment industry leader CardConnect, you can get integrated payment processing in Smart Service Enterprise and Smart Service 365. Smart Service has streamlined credit card processing for field service businesses, and has created some very innovative solutions for ACH payments as well.

With Smart Service Payment Processing, you get fully PCI compliant credit card processing capabilities that integrate seamlessly into an award-winning scheduling and dispatching field service software system. It makes taking payments in the field, office, or online (via a hosted payment page) easier, faster, and safer than ever. Payments link to jobs, and everything gets pushed over to Quickbooks for quick and easy reconciliation. 

Smart Service utilizes card capture technology to give your service technicians the ability to quickly and accurately scan card info into the payment fields, eliminating the need for peripheral-based card swipers/scanners (which usually need their own charging system and can’t hold up to the rugged field service environment). Smart Service card capture technology also allows technicians to scan a paper check for ACH transactions in the field, making it easier than ever to electronically process checks!

Smart Service Payment Processing also offers great rates! We’ve talked about not starting and ending the conversation at the rate alone, but with Smart Service you don’t have to sacrifice features and functionality for rate, you can get both. Smart Service offers a variety of processing rate options tailored to your business’ processing needs, and they will match or beat your existing processing rates, guaranteed.  

Taking advantage of integrated payment processing for your field service business is very important. Integration allows you and your employees to save time and reduce errors while delivering seamless, secure service to your customers. Smart Service Payment Processing offers you that integration at some of the most competitive rates in the business. Start saving time and money right now and streamline your payment processing with Smart Service. Request a demo today!