‘Integrated payment processing’ is defined as a having your credit/debit card processing service tightly integrated with your retail point of sale (POS) system.  An integrated payment processing solution offers the following advantages:

• Reduces Errors – Integrated payment systems electronically transfer payment and confirmation data directly to your POS system.   This electronic transfer of financial data reduces the potential for errors, fraudulent transactions and employee theft by eliminating the need to manually re-enter data from your credit card terminal into your POS system.
• Lowers Payroll Costs - An integrated payment system eliminates the time that your employees spend manually re-entering data from one system to other.  When you consider the hourly cost of an employee, the costs of this inefficient business process can really add up. Plus it speeds up the checkout process.
• Less Time Spent Reconciling Financials – With smaller retailers, the burden of re-verifying credit card information and reconciling payment statements back and forth to financial statements usually falls on the owner and/or store manager.  Besides the cost of payroll, there is a huge opportunity cost from using these valuable resources for mundane tasks such as chasing down data entry errors instead of having them focused on customer relations and growth initiatives. 
• Provides Better Insight Into Your Business - When you integrate payment processing information with your POS system, you will be able to create up-to-date and accurate reports combining store and payment information.   These combined reports give you much better visibility into your business.
• Increases Your Cash Flow - Every retailer wants to increase cash flow.  By closely monitoring payments, you can reduce days’ sales outstanding (DSO), and speed up the process to post receivables and improve cash flow.
• Reduces Exposure to PCI Breaches - Using an integrated payments solution from a PA-DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) certified vendor ensures that all exchanges of payment data are secure and PCI compliant with PCI security standards, which mandate that businesses safely encrypt and store PIN numbers, CVV2 numbers and magnetic stripe data.
• Supports Additional Value Added Services- Many additional services are available through integrated payments:
  • Use of LCD screen on payment terminal for items being rung up
  • Tokenization services such as secure hosted card vault for recurring and card not present billing
  • Loyalty programs
  • Advertising and marketing programs

Integrated payment processing can help you reduce costs and improve efficiency. If you currently use a payment processing solution that is not integrated with your store POS system, it may be worth it to re-evaluate the hidden costs of operational inefficiencies of your current set-up and research you new options to see if you can save time and money.

Additional Resources

MicroBiz Cloud Integrated Payments