Between last year and this year till date, much of the financial and technological revolution has been about navigating the pandemic. Covid-19 forced businesses, big and small, to embrace digitization fast – banking and finance being no different.
If you’re a business owner or an employee reading this today – kudos for your resilience. You deserve it!
For startups and small businesses especially, the challenge has been enormous.
Fortunately, this was also the time when businesses learned the power of collaboration – be it a local pharmacy delivering medicines online with the help of hyper-local delivery startups or an English tutor who set up online classes for a global audience with the help of e-learning platforms.
However, digitization also forced businesses to question the way they carry out their banking and finance.
The F&B industry witnessed a whopping 69% growth between January to March 2021. For F&B and other industries as well, UPI continues to be the most preferred payment option, followed by debit cards, credit cards, and netbanking.
This, however, grossly understates the pain that each of these businesses go through while reconciling their payments. Setting up refunds is a time-consuming and tiring process. Not to mention the pain when it comes to tracking every rupee that flows through the cash cycle.
Banking and finance is broken for businesses
In the end, businesses are almost always finding themselves juggling between multiple login interfaces – from their bank accounts to their accounting softwares like Quickbooks or Zoho to even corporate card applications like Happay – all of which are fine solutions by themselves.
The problem is – all these solutions are efficient on their own but they don’t talk to each other.
The need of the hour today is – to have an integrated financial solution. One that provides businesses with banking, payments, accounting, expense management – in short everything together, in one place.
Growing businesses have growing needs – the most important of which is complete control over their finances. Juggling multiple dashboards together and manually uploading and tracking tons of excel sheets doesn’t give that control.
At Open, we have been working hard to solve the challenges our users face, be it manually tracking unnecessary spends or reconciling every single payment. You can visit our website or read our comprehensive article on how Open’s online bank account helps businesses do their banking & finance better but I wanted to highlight the basics first:
Get paid by forwarding invoice on email
Imagine a simple online bank account with which you as a business owner & your team can create GST-compliant invoices for payment collection. You forward this invoice to your customer’s email address. They pay you directly through the payment link that is integrated into the invoice – via UPI or debit cards or credit cards or netbanking – it’s their choice!
The moment money hits your account, you’re notified – so you know who has paid you & who hasn’t. Does this sound simple yet useful?
Pay faster with one Excel file upload
Now let me paint the other side of the picture. To pay all your employees and vendors – all you need to do is upload a simple excel file into this bank account with basic information like your employee or vendor’s name, email address, their bank account numbers, and the IFSC Codes – that’s it. You’ll be able to pay salaries on time or make payments to your vendors without any fail – directly from this one account.
What’s more?
Every single payment that has been made will get reflected in the bookkeeping section under expenses made – categorized as your accounting team would need them to be.
If this sounded intriguing to you, then you’ll love the next bit am sure.
Track every rupee spent without chasing anyone
Instead of reviewing hundreds of expenses every month, what if you could set up a budget, ensure all spends remain within that budget, and for any duplicate or unusual spend – you or the right team is notified instantly?
What if every member of your team is empowered to spend when and where necessary without waiting for approvals and queuing up during month-end reconciliation with receipts at hand?
All of this and more can be achieved with Open’s corporate cards that are connected with this bank account which in turn literally let’s you track every rupee spent for your business.
Reports that help you learn more about your business
Bookkeeping reports like Profit & Loss, Cashflow, etc. help businesses understand where exactly is each rupee coming from or going, drilling down into departments, merchants, customers, and taxes!
I don’t need to tell you it is one of the most powerful features to have.
On top of it, if your GST and TDS calculations are automatically done and can be paid directly from this one bank account without even logging into the government portals – isn’t this the peace of mind you’ve been vying for this long?
This is the power of the online bank account – your Open account. Together. Simple. Powerful.
Banking & finance – everything together – to grow your business
Our goal at Open is to bring everything – that your growing business needs – together. Almost four years ago, we started by addressing the immediate needs of an Indian business owner – to build a great financial solution to manage their business.
Since then, we’ve imagined and reimagined, worked and reworked on how great banking, cards, accounting and payments should look like for an Indian business that wants to thrive.
Together, with unified banking, payments, spend management, and accounting – in one dashboard – we want businesses in India to focus more on their core. We want business owners, employees, the accounting & finance teams – to have peace of mind – which all of you rightfully deserve.
If you’ve any questions on how Open can help your business, leave a comment below or write to us at [email protected], and we will get back to you right away!
Till then, keep thriving.
Related Articles –
How Open simplifies business finance for e-commerce startups?
Decoding neobanking: Why neobanks are winning over businesses
Neobanking for SMEs: A lawyer’s take on fintech
Simplifying business finances & accounting with Open
All you need to know about Open – banking that gets your business
How neobanks are disrupting the banking space
