Are Your Payments Working as Hard as Your Business?

Read time: 4 minutes 

Most businesses in manufacturing, construction, wholesale distribution, and professional services spend considerable time measuring the parts of their operations that drive performance. They track production schedules, job costing, inventory turns, customer terms, cash flow, and countless operational KPIs. 

Payments, by contrast, are often set up once and left alone. 

As long as invoices are going out and customers are paying, it’s easy to assume everything is working as it should. But processing payments and maximizing payment performance are two very different things. 

Here’s the question most businesses have never asked: How well are your payments actually performing compared to businesses like yours? 

If you don’t know the answer, you’re not alone. Most organizations have never benchmarked their payment performance. Without that context, it’s nearly impossible to know whether you’re operating efficiently or quietly leaving revenue, cash flow, and operational improvements on the table.

The Difference Between Payments That Process and Payments That Perform 

One of the biggest blind spots in B2B operations is assuming that because payments are processing, they’re performing. 

In reality, payment underperformance rarely announces itself. It shows up as failed transactions, unnecessary processing costs, slower cash flow, manual reconciliation, disconnected workflows, or customers who encounter friction when they’re ready to pay. None of those issues may appear as a single line item on a report, but together they can create a meaningful drag on financial performance. 

Consider a few examples. 

• A manufacturer with net-30 terms and a manual invoicing process may be carrying more days sales outstanding than necessary, not because customers are unwilling to pay, but because the payment experience itself creates unnecessary delays. 
• A wholesale distributor processing thousands of invoices may have little visibility into which payment methods are underperforming or how its payment acceptance rate compares with similar businesses. 
• A construction company managing progress billing and retainage may spend hours every month reconciling payments across disconnected systems without realizing there are more efficient ways to manage the workflow. 

None of these represent broken payment systems. They represent payment performance that has never been measured.

What Most Businesses Have Never Measured 

Consider a simple question: Do you know your payment acceptance rate? 

More importantly, do you know how it compares with businesses of similar size and within your industry? Most businesses don’t. 

That isn’t because they’re doing anything wrong. Historically, payment performance data has been difficult to access, even harder to interpret, and nearly impossible to benchmark without broad visibility into how comparable organizations are performing. 

As a result, many payment decisions are still made based on familiarity, processing costs, or whether the existing system appears to be functioning. Those are reasonable factors to consider, but they don’t tell the whole story. 

Benchmarking does. It shifts the conversation from “Are our payments running?” to “Are our payments helping the business perform better?”

Introducing the Fortis Growth Index 

That’s exactly why Fortis created the Growth Index. The Fortis Growth Index is a free benchmarking assessment that helps businesses evaluate how their payments are performing compared with peers in their industry, vertical, and revenue range. 

In less than two minutes, the assessment evaluates four key dimensions of payment performance: 

• Visibility into payment data and performance 

• Alignment between payment options and customer preferences 

• Friction throughout the payment experience 

• How effectively your payment strategy supports long-term business growth 

The result is a personalized score with practical insights into where your payments are performing well and where opportunities may exist to improve efficiency, accelerate cash flow, and strengthen the customer experience. 

For many businesses, the findings aren’t dramatic. Payments aren’t broken. They’re simply capable of doing more.

Visibility Creates Better Decisions 

The businesses that get the most value from their payments aren’t necessarily the ones with the newest technology or the lowest processing rates. They’re the ones that understand how their payments are performing and use that visibility to continuously improve. 

That’s the real value of benchmarking. Once you understand where your payment experience stands today, you can make more informed decisions about where to reduce friction, improve cash flow, streamline operations, and better support future growth. 

If you’ve never measured your payment performance against businesses like yours, there’s a good chance you’re missing opportunities you simply can’t see today. 

The Fortis Growth Index gives you a fast, practical way to uncover them. 

See how your payment performance measures up.

Take the Free Growth Index Assessment