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Running a business

How to Bring Cashless Payments to Your Retail Business

By QuickBooks Australia

Published on June 11, 2024

headline

Consumer spending habits are always evolving. In the past, cash payments were the standard for day-to-day spending.

In 2007, around 70 per cent of daily consumer purchases involved cash. In contrast, in 2019 cash was used for only 27% of consumer purchases.

Cash has been on a downward trend as more and more people prefer to use debit cards, credit cards, or other forms of cashless payment. In February 2020, only 1 in 12 businesses operated as cashless. COVID-19 accelerated this trend and in February 2021, that became 1 in 4.

Consumers across Australia have grown to prefer online ordering, contactless or cashless payments, click and collect, and no-contact delivery as a result of the pandemic's widespread reliance on the convenience of eCommerce.

So while cash remains important to some people, more businesses are offering cashless payments options.

If you are a small business, this means you need to have efficient systems in place to manage and monitor cashless payments.

What Is A Cashless Payment?

Paying for a good or service without any hard currency is known as a cashless payment. Cashless payments include those made using digital wallets, credit card payments, smartphone payments, and bank transfers. To complete a purchase, the customer does not need to have any physical cash on them.

To explain this fully, we need to differentiate between cashless and contactless payments. We can group these together as digital payments.

Contactless Payments

Payment transactions made with contactless cards or a mobile device are known as contactless payments.

You can "tap-and-go" or "wave and pay" instead of swiping or inserting your bank card into a scanner and entering a PIN. You need to put your bank card or a phone with contactless technology close to the reader to make a purchase. A mobile phone must first be configured and verified before contactless payments may be made.

With a contactless payment system like this, all first-party data related to purchases go directly to the bank.

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Digital Payments

Cashless systems like Square and PayPal allow your business to collect customer data.

If your retail business introduces a cashless payment system, customers can pay via an in-app mobile wallet, via QR codes, or via a radio-frequency identification (RFID) wearable.

The customer securely purchases whatever they want at your retail business and, since there are no third parties or intermediaries (banks) involved, you collect all the data. This data can hold valuable information about spending habits that you can’t get from a standard contactless system.

Such data can be used to create customised, individualised marketing campaigns to help reinforce your messaging to customers. It can also offer insights to help improve future events and experiences and provide information to help with stock management.

Beyond the benefits of data collection, these cashless payment systems offer much better protection against payment fraud than simple bank-reliant contactless systems.

Open Loop vs. Closed Loop Operations

What we’re outlining here is the benefits of a closed-loop payment system (cashless payment system) versus an open-loop system (contactless payments) within the category of digital payments.

Cashless payment systems give you as the retailer complete ownership over the entire seller/customer process. Retailers maintain their own financial ecosystem and retain all payment data as a result.

Cashless Payments With QuickBooks

QuickBooks can facilitate a convenient and manageable payments process, offering more payment options for your customers.

With QuickBooks payment software, you can offer your customers more ways to pay with our payment partners, PayPal and Square.

By safely importing your transactions into QuickBooks, you can save time and effort. All payments you receive online or while you're on the go, show up right away in QuickBooks. This gives you a real-time, holistic view of your payments wherever you are from various devices.

This flexibility extends to your customers, too. You can send easy-to-manage invoices that customers can pay anywhere, anytime, on any device.

With all the above data integrated into QuickBooks Online accounting software it allows you to manage cash flow, make your own payments, track your tax obligations, and gain insights form reporting and insights to help you make business decisions with confidence.

Take a look at our plans and pricing or opt for a free trial to discover how our services can make accounting a breeze for your business.

FAQs

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