4 Reasons You Need a Payment Portal

According to UK government research published in 2025, 28% of UK businesses are hit by late payments every year, and those that are affected are owed £17,000 on average.

As a business, you need to be easy to pay.  Buyers will often order multiple times in a given invoice period. You probably then send out the same generic automated Account Statement email with the amount owing - however that gets lost in the clutter and buyers still check this against each indiviudal invoice.
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If buyers are required to manually send funds by bank, this is also a hassle and prone to errors. With a one-lump sum hitting your bank account for multiple orders, statement lines need to be manually reconciled to individual invoices - costing your accounting team time.

Here are four reasons you need a payment portal.

1Improve buyer convenience

People pay what is easy to pay. If a buyer has to dig through emails for an invoice, find your bank details and then work out which invoices are still outstanding, payment slides down the to-do list.

Not every late payment is deliberate. Hiscox's 2026 Late Payments Report found that 23% of all payments to small businesses arrive late. Plenty of those will be simple friction rather than bad intent.

A payment portal removes that friction. Your buyer sees every open invoice in one place, with the amounts and due dates clear, and can pay without digging around for the right invoicing documents.

Buyers can easily find invoices and produce Account Statements, where the OrderHub is accessed via one URL link. This link is sent to buyers when an order is Authorised in your accounting system.

When paying you is the easy part of their day, you get paid sooner.

2One-click payments

Multi-step manual payments (i.e bank transfer) will never outperform one-click digital payments.

A good payment portal will let buyers pay as multiple invoices, by bank transfer, in one click. With Orderlinks, buyers will see amount outstanding and late payment total, and can pay all invoices in these buckets via one digital payment.
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A payment portal may offer card payments, which are expensive and eat into already thin margins. However with the emergence of Pay by Bank options, these options don't rely on third-party infrastructure (e.g. Visa, Mastercard) and are therefore lower cost.

Cost-effective digital payments (e.g. bank transfer), gives you the ability to simplify payment without absorbing high fees.  

Shorten the path to payment and more invoices get paid on the day they are opened.

3Slash manual admin

UK government research found that affected businesses spend an average of 86 hours a year on staff time chasing late payments.

That is time spent writing reminder emails, checking bank statements, matching payments to invoices and having uncomfortable conversations with customers, rather than serving them.

A portal takes most of that off your plate. Buyers can see what is outstanding without asking you, payments are recorded as they arrive, and automated reminders can nudge the invoices that are running late.

4Auto-reconcile all buyer payments

Xero won't automatically match one lump-sum payment to multiple invoices. Someone has to work out which invoices the payment covered, then manually reconcile. Multiply that across every buyer who pays in bulk, and reconciliation becomes a weekly puzzle.

A payment portal removes the puzzle. With payments going through a payment portal, you should then be receiving funds into your bank account on a per-order basis. This allows for the accounting system to match the bank transfer amount to the individual sales invoice.

Importantly, payments arrive into your bank account gross of fee allowing for the automatic reconciliation. Payment fees are then invoiced monthly.

Not having to manually reconcile bulk payments gives your team time back, and reduces human errors along the way.