Smart Pay: Delivering an Integrated Accounting & Payment Process

Visma e-conomic and November First’s collaborative endeavor Smart Pay makes payments a whole lot easier! Now you can embed payments directly into your accounting software and streamline your payments and accounting processes!

By Marria Qibtia Sikandar Nagra

Delivering a unified payment solution to customers helps combat work process errors that may be caused due to manual entries, data duplication, and redundant communication between bookkeeping and approvers of payments. Smart Pay is built on the e-conomic platform and has November

First’s Payment engine integrated to create a solution that offers accounting and payment in one process, helping

SMEs save up on crucial time, without compromising control and security.

“Visma e-conomic’s well-defined API, and November First’s knowledge of the payment space, allowed us to set a high ambitions for a collaboration, with the goal to generate value for Visma e-conomic’s 170,000 customers”, says Mikael

Nilsson, CEO of November First.

“We realized that if we want to get into the business of handling people’s money, we needed to find a trusted partner who was regulated and could be taken seriously. We found a good match in

November First, in terms of a company that we could deeply integrate into our e-conomic workflow and give our customers a great experience,” adds Lars

Engbork, CEO of Visma e-conomic.

Automate Invoice Payments With Smart Pay you can skip logging into the online bank, and approve and pay supplier invoices directly from within e-conomic.

But that’s not all Smart Pay has to offer. Smart Pay also represents a merge between banking and accounting, that eliminates unnecessary and fragmented workflows, and provides the SMEs an opportunity to save time and improve their bottom line.

“What we’ve done is to create a flexible service automating the process of paying invoices that is suited to however a given company operates on a day to day basis across platforms - mobile and web. Once a payment is approved Smart Pay takes care of everything in a logical digitalized process, eliminating the need for mails and calls. Further, the Smart Pay logic is at its core built to support the collaboration between business owners and accountants. The exchange of data happens behind the scenes and is only possible because both companies have great APIs that work very well together. We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure that November First’s and Visma e-conomic’s team members function as one team,” says Engbork.

Avail Better Exchange Rates With the rapid technological developments, efficiency gains and improved bottom line is available for those who embrace it. Smart Pay is instrumental in the digitalisation of the financial function, where manual process is becoming a thing of the past. The collaboration is still the same, just highly digitalized, consolidated and streamlined.

“With Smart Pay, businesses and bookkeepers can attach invoices to payments so business owners always know what they’re paying for. In addition, businesses can take advantage of better exchange rates on foreign payments, meaning more money stays in their pocket. The SME’s get access to similar competitive exchange rates as the large corporations, and are offered lower fees too - all in real time if needed“ adds Nilsson.

Lars Engbork, CEO of Visma e-conomic & Mikael Nilsson, CEO of November First.

ering the entire invoice journey. This includes receiving the invoice, registering it in the accounting system, passing it on to be paid, making the payment, and then reconciling the account - and very important also all the surrounding repair flows. When looking at companies that sell invoice management services, they typically charge a hefty price per invoice at double or quadruple of the cost of Smart Pay” remarks Nilsson.

“As we move forward, we will make it even easier for our customers to use Smart Pay. I think that the key here is that we’re going to do the integration even more seamlessly and add further features to the convenience of our customers to using Smart Pay,” concludes Engbork.