As you can probably attest from personal experience, most people don’t have a lot of cash on hand these days. Rather than paying for goods and services with dirty, easy-to-lose coins and bills, we often prefer to handle transactions via credit and debit. This is convenient for consumers but a bit of an obstacle for business owners, who must find ways of processing these payments — even when they are in the field servicing a customer and not at the company’s home base.

Remote payment processing is a must in today’s world, and thankfully there are a number of good options available. The best of these allow your employees to enter credit card transactions on their mobile device — either a smartphone or tablet. These work in a couple different ways. You can manually enter credit card numbers into your device or, in some cases, there is additional hardware that can be added to enable card swiping. In either case, you will be able to quickly and securely process an electronic transaction using 3G, 4G or wireless internet.

Business owners seeking a specific mobile payment device have several unique technologies to choose from, all with their merits and all worth looking into. Some of the big ones include Square, PayAnywhere, Worldpay and PayPal Here. These mobile payment processors come with some key advantages, the main one being you can process payments anywhere you have phone reception, enabling your technicians and other employees to provide quick, responsive customer service. There’s also no need to invest in further hardware, unless the ability to actually swipe a card is something you’re passionate about. (It is certainly a convenience but hardly a necessity.)

But what about price? For most of these payment services, you can download the app to your mobile devices without having to pay for it. While the initial download is free, the specific payment processing company will typically deduct a small percentage of each transaction. Most of these services will charge around 2.75 percent, give or take.

As you research these tools, make sure you get a full pricing agreement up front and review it carefully. Something else to inquire about is cyber security. Ask to see documentation showing PCI compliance, which ought to confirm that all transactions are encrypted, only the last four numbers of a credit card are ever displayed, and no credit card information is actually stored on your device.

One caveat is that some customers are still resistant to the idea of handing over their credit card to some guy with an iPhone, so you’ll want to ensure that you still accept checks and other, more traditional payment forms. That said, any company that regularly sends employees into customers’ homes really can’t afford not to take remote payments, so it’s worth your time to seek out some good tools.

About the Author
Amanda E. Clark is the president and editor-in-chief of Grammar Chic Inc., a full-service professional writing company. She is a published ghostwriter and editor, and currently under contract with literary agencies in Malibu, California, and Dublin, Ireland.

Since founding Grammar Chic in 2008, Clark, along with her team of skilled professional writers, has offered expertise to clients in the creative, business and academic fields. The company accepts a wide range of projects and often engages in content and social media marketing, drafts resumes, press releases, web content, marketing materials and ghostwritten creative pieces. Contact Clark at www.grammarchic.net.