Unfiltered with Lochan Sim: The Biggest Hurdles to Getting Paid

Most businesses understand the cost of winning a customer. Far fewer have visibility into the true operational cost of getting paid.

In the businesses we work with at Klipboard, the biggest cost often looks like the transaction fees - it's transparent, easy to calculate but that's often only a small part. There's lots of additional costs that sit in everything around the payment:

• delayed payments.
• manual tasks (processing, chasing, etc.).
• reconciliation effort.
• fraud risk and payment disputes.
• cross-department dependencies slowing tasks.
• and the impact all of this has on cash flow, liquidity.

Many of these issues can stem from both internal and external sources, making them particularly difficult to identify and manage.

A customer delays payment because the process is inconvenient. Finance teams spend time chasing invoices. Operations teams wait for payment confirmation before progressing work. Customer service teams become involved in disputes and payment queries.

Individually, these may seem like small inefficiencies. But across a large operational business, they compound quickly.

Payment friction quietly affects cash flow

One of the biggest misconceptions around payments is that faster payments are simply a finance benefit.

In reality, payment speed directly affects how the wider business operates. When payments are delayed:

• working capital becomes tighter.
• forecasting becomes harder.
• operational planning slows down.
• and more time is spent managing uncertainty.

The impact looks different depending on the size of the business. For larger organisations, even small delays across thousands of transactions can create significant pressure on cash flow.

For smaller businesses, a handful of late payments can have a much more personal impact, affecting day-to-day decisions, investment plans and, ultimately, the business owner's own pocket.

This is why the payment experience itself matters far more than many businesses realise.

Customers rarely delay payments deliberately, this often happens at critical moments:

• a rental job finishes on site, but the payment link isn't ready.
• a parts order is ready to be fulfilled, but invoicing hasn't been completed.
• a field engineer moves on before payment is complete.

The longer a payment takes to complete, the more likely it is to move into what I often think of as the “later” bucket: “I’ll come back to it later”, “I’ll sort it tomorrow”, “I’ll wait until I’m back at my desk”.

And once that happens, payment behaviour changes completely.

Impact of friction in payments

Payment operations are still heavily manual

Another hidden cost sits inside the operational effort required to manage payments.

Many businesses have invested heavily in digitising operations, while payment processes remain surprisingly manual.

Often, payment disputes take place over the phone, reconciliation means switching between an ERP, payment provider and accounts package, and reporting is done in spreadsheets, outside of any of these systems.

Finance teams spend huge amounts of time validating information across platforms before they can even begin analysing performance properly.

This creates operational drag that rarely gets measured accurately.

Payments are becoming an operational issue, not just a finance issue

This is where I think the industry conversation is starting to shift.

Payments are directly influencing customer conversion, operational efficiency and cash flow. Businesses that reduce payment friction often see wider efficiency benefits:

• Faster payment cycles.
• Fewer disputes.
• Lower admin overhead.
• Better visibility across the business.

The organisations that will manage this best over the next few years are unlikely to be the ones simply chasing lower transaction fees.

They’ll be the ones that understand how payment journeys affect the entire business workflow. Because the cost of getting paid is rarely just the payment itself, it’s everything that happens around it.

For more information on the efficiency costs behind every payment you take ready our Hidden Costs of Payments guide.