Today’s construction industry is more competitive than ever. The result: margins are slim, budgets are tight, and the stakes are high.

It’s critical to improve cash flow, maintain great relationships with subcontractors, and provide strategic analysis to the rest of the business. Innovations in payments solutions make it possible to do all of this as well as reduce human error in the back office, mitigate fraud, and free up valuable time for your accounting team to focus on strategic initiatives.

The following are five areas where custom payments solutions can deliver significant results.

1. Cash Flow

Finance teams today are often drowning in data. Technology now makes it possible for businesses to integrate that data into unified systems, making it easier to analyze and identify opportunities to improve cash flow. These tools should be able to connect your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with the bank’s payment and other services.

You’ll also eliminate questions about your cash position — it’s all available at a glance, giving you greater control over maintaining liquidity, managing debt, and sustaining your creditworthiness. Check-based payments are costly and hit your bottom line, but they also hit the bottom line of the financial institution you use.

2. Reputation With Subcontractors

It is absolutely necessary to monitor the health of your company’s reputation. One way to keep your hard-earned reputation polished is to pay on time and in the way the payee wants to be paid.

By automating some of the manual work involved with paying subcontractors in this way, your company can issue payments quickly. It also will offer a variety of electronic payment options, such as Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments, direct-to-debit cards, and payments through Visa+ directly into Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, or another digital wallet.

All are attractive options that are simple for your team to execute, enhance convenience, and foster loyalty among your workforce.

3. Accuracy

Mistakes in accounts payable (A/P) aren’t just embarrassing; they’re expensive. For example, many modern payments solutions use artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically validate invoices, match them with purchase orders, and ensure all data is accurately logged into the system.

Additionally, intelligent systems integrated with ERP platforms can instantly cross-check payment details against supplier agreements and flag discrepancies. Your business can use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to scan and automatically input invoice data into your payments network, bypassing the need for manual keying and the potential errors that come with it.

4. Fraud Mitigation

Unfortunately, no industry is immune from bad actors. Mail theft-related check fraud, for example, continues to be a significant risk for businesses that rely on mailing paper checks as payment.

Technology can allow your company to submit an electronic file to your bank each day detailing the checks that the business issues. Then, as each check is presented for payment, the system electronically compares it to the information in your file.

5. Strategic Initiatives

You want everyone on your finance and accounting teams to be doing the highest value work possible. In many construction businesses, A/P employees still spend significant time opening mail and email, checking invoices, and tracking down approvals. Then, after the payment is made, they have to reconcile, file, and store each one.

These time-consuming and inefficient tasks erode profits by using significant employee work hours for each step of the process and for after-action auditing. The automation provided by custom-made payments solutions is a great way to reduce this workload and increase the efficiency of your finance teams. Companies that have made the switch report substantial efficiency gains.

A Futureproofed Approach

Construction companies typically invest countless hours reconciling payments, tracking vendor information, and chasing down approvals. By adopting cutting-edge tools for cash flow management, fraud mitigation, and error reduction, financial professionals have an unprecedented ability to modernize operations and drive success.

Whether your goals are to improve cash flow, solidify subcontractor trust, increase accuracy, mitigate fraud, or give your finance team the bandwidth to tackle more strategic priorities, the right payments solution is key.

As you compare options, off-the-shelf solutions will likely seem inadequate. Many systems offer flexibility to integrate seamlessly with existing banking relationships without overhauling their entire back-office operation.

By leveraging cutting-edge technology, you’ll be able to position your financial infrastructure — and your business — for long-term success.