Opening a business account is considered an important step toward running your company’s finances effectively and for smooth operations. Regardless of whether you are a start up, or are established & heading into new markets, a well chosen & researched business account offers vital tools to help you manage your finances, payments, and accounting. In this blog, we will outline ten critical factors you have to consider before opening a business account.
1. Time it takes to set up an account:
Time could become a critical factor in a business setup. Traditional financial institutions usually take days or even weeks to open a business account. Plus, they are often associated with tedious paperwork & compliance checks. Thankfully, financial solutions are now designed for getting you into a business account in a day.
2. Requirements: High Initial Deposit and Minimum Balance:
Traditional business accounts are characterized by a significantly high initial deposit or maintaining a minimum balance. If you do not satisfy this requirement, you might encounter penalty charges. As a small business or a startup, such rigid conditions unnecessarily strain your cash flow. So, you need to check that before choosing a business account.
3. Multi-Currency Capabilities:
If your business deals with lots of international clients or suppliers, you’ll need a multi-currency business account that can handle all of these transactions for you. A multi-currency account helps you to send and receive payments in other currencies without inducing a big conversion fee.
4. Charges and Sneaky Fees:
Most financial organizations mainly charge through account maintenance fees, transaction fees, and importation fees when taking in foreign currency; the accumulation of these can be sizable. When choosing a business account, you should seek out transparent models for pricing.
5. Virtual and Physical Cards:
Corporate cards should be easily available from business accounts to help manage all of the expenses incurred. A provider offering virtual and physical cards would be great because virtual cards are issued really fast and are convenient for online transactions.
6. Accounting Software Integration:
Keeping your account books updated is quite crucial for the financial health of any business. Keeping them updated while manually doing it would consume a lot of time and might be prone to errors as well. Most accounts even offer real-time transaction syncing and other advanced feature applications like receipt attachment, payment status update, and text recognition, among others. This improves minimal occurrences of human errors and enables you to close books faster so you can still work on other important things.
7. Account Security and Protecting Your Money:
The safekeeping of your business funds is always paramount. Make sure that a selected financial institution offers strong safeguards. Most decent suppliers conduct business with well established organizations where your money is safely kept. Further consider a provider who ensures that your funds will be always accessible to you and cannot be used by the financial institution for its needs. Doing so, you can operate freely knowing that your money is safer.
8. International Payment Speed:
When conducting a lot of business internationally, you need a business account that can make dealing with foreign payments easy. Some business accounts allow for the sending and receiving of payments in over 30 currencies with low and transparent fees. You’ll avoid costly transaction costs with competitive exchange rates, and you can even use real-time currency calculators to get an estimation of the rates and savings of the foreign transfers before it is too late.
9. Customer Support and Scalability:
As your business grows, so does your financial requirement. Be sure to opt for a business account that scales alongside your needs as they increase. Some providers offer flexible features that grow with you – which means you can readily add more users, cards, and integrations as your business grows. Another important thing is that the account provider should provide you with good customer support so you have access to help when you need it.
10. Expense Management Tools:
As your business grows, keeping track of and managing all of your expenses can really become chaotic. Find a business account that automatically integrates expense management tools. You can issue numerous corporate cards, set spending limits, track transactions, and categorize expenses automatically with these tools.
Using the right business account will therefore help streamline many financial procedures, eliminate manual errors, and allow you to focus on what’s really important: growing your business! So, whether you are just starting out or already an established business, it pays to do things the right way by making an informed decision when it comes to setting up a business account that is going to work for the long term.