Executives are elevating their technology expense management (TEM) strategies, and 80% say bill pay is part of the problem. Only 26% are confident their current approach can keep up with growing complexity, visibility demands, and the need for tighter financial control. The rest expect to evaluate new solutions in the next 12-24 months.
Where do you stand? If you’re already using a TEM provider, outsourcing bill pay is a natural next step. This is something more companies need to understand, so let’s break it down: why executives are sounding the alarm on bill pay, and what it looks like to move from reactive payments to proactive financial control.
Why is Bill Pay So Tricky?
It seems straightforward: bill in, bill paid. In reality, it’s much more nuanced.
IT owns the services, but AP owns the payments.
In most cases, the team closest to the impact of late or mistimed payments typically isn’t the one controlling when those payments go out. So, what’s going on with AP? Sometimes they’re tied up by regulations or policies they must adhere to. A lot of times, they’re just swamped. It’s easiest to pay in batches, which means some invoices get paid early, others late, and some inconsistently. When you’re managing thousands of invoices across the business, you don’t always see which services are mission-critical or the impact of late payment.
Bill pay is still considered transactional, not strategic.
It’s not always a matter of paying late. Some companies pay a bill the second the invoice comes in without thinking about what that means for their cash position. We’ve seen customers extend their cash runway by up to 30 days just by reworking how payments are handled. There could be all sorts of strategies you haven’t considered that an outside partner can help identify and then manage to stay consistent at scale.
How Outsourcing Pays Off (No Pun Intended)
You’re saving money.
Carriers rake in billions each year through late fees and interest charges. The larger the organization, the larger the losses. For companies with annual revenue between $251M to $1B, as well as fast-scaling organizations, the loss of annual revenue to consistently missed payments ranges in the 10-22%. It’s safe to say the cost of a managed bill pay service – well, pays for itself.
See how Tangoe Pay was a game changer for Experian – no more late fees or service disruptions, ever.
You’re engineering how cash moves through the business.
The moment a payment goes out, cash leaves the business. The goal is to hold onto it as long as possible to preserve working capital, but not so long that you trigger late fees, incur interest, or risk service disruptions. Teams understand the balance, it’s just difficult to maintain consistently at scale.
As economic pressures and stresses increase, managed bill pay brings structure to that balance. You set the payment policies and they’ll be applied consistently at scale. That gives you a level of predictability you can count on for unlocking working capital and optimizing technology spend, making sure every IT dollar is controlled and working for the business.
You’re realizing significant time savings.
It doesn’t take long to make a payment – it’s making thousands of them and managing everything around them. The average AP team loses about 20 hours a week, research shows. Outsourcing bill pay removes much of that manual effort by centralizing the process and standardizing how payments are handled. Payments run cleanly in the background, freeing you up for higher-value work. And if an error is flagged after payment, guess who’s resolving that issue? Not you.
It gives everyone what they want.
In the world of TEM, there are typically three key stakeholders: IT, finance, and procurement. For IT, managed bill pay ensures reliability. Payments are made on time, and so systems stay up and running. Finance gets control – yes, more control than if they were to handle it all in-house. They make the decisions, and the managed parter executes them consistently at scale, handling hiccups that inevitably happen. Procurement benefits from stronger vendor/carrier relationships. Less risk, less friction, and a better foundation for negotiating rates and pushing for better terms.
Tangoe Pay: The Cherry on Top of your TEM Solution
Bill pay needs to shift from reactive payments to proactive financial control. For companies already using the Tangoe One TEM platform, Tangoe Pay – our managed bill pay solution – is designed to seamlessly snap in and start delivering all these benefitsimmediately.
For many organizations, Tangoe Pay brings much-needed discipline to an area of technology expense management where visibility and control break down. Our leading platform puts AI to work across the entire technology expense management lifecyclefor cloud, mobility, and telecom services. Adding Tangoe Pay extends this AI intelligence to bill pay with an expert handling every step, helping you work smarter and save money while staying in full control.
Ready to never pay a late fee again? Check out Tangoe Pay here.