Moving Beyond BACS to Get Paid Faster

The invoice went out on time. The cash did not.

Your team did everything right. The work was delivered, the invoice was raised, the terms were agreed. Yet the money is still days away, moving quietly through a Bacs cycle while your business waits on funds it has already earned.

For many UK businesses, this delay is one of the biggest drags on cash flow. It is also one of the most fixable. Here is what moving beyond Bacs looks like, and why it gets you paid faster.

Bacs, and the three-day clock you are paying for

Bacs is the backbone of UK business payments, and it was never built for speed.

Bacs (the Bankers’ Automated Clearing System) processes Direct Debit and Direct Credit payments on a fixed three-day cycle. A payment is submitted on day one, processed on day two, and settled on day three. It is reliable, low cost, and familiar, which is exactly why so much of the mid-market still runs on it.

The number that captures this wait is Days Sales Outstanding, or DSO. It measures how long, on average, it takes to turn a completed sale into cash in your account. The longer your DSO, the more of your own money sits in transit instead of working for your business. And the waiting is widespread. According to the Federation of Small Businesses, the majority of UK small businesses experienced late payment in every quarter of 2022, and the Office of the Small Business Commissioner puts the cost of late payments to the UK economy at £11 billion a year.

Why your customers already want to move faster

The way businesses want to pay is changing, and it is changing from the top down.

Plenty of mid-market buyers still default to a bank transfer, but demand is shifting. Card is already how most money moves in the UK, with UK Finance reporting that card transactions passed £1 trillion in 2024. Businesses expect that shift to continue. In one Mastercard study, 48% of B2B suppliers said they expect buyer demand for card payments to grow over the next five years. For a growing number of your customers, paying by card is not a last resort. It is how they prefer to manage spend and cash timing.

Here is what many finance teams miss. If a customer is ready to pay you today on a card, and your only option is a three-day bank transfer, you have quietly become the slowest step in your own sales cycle.

The faster route is card and account payments

That faster route is card and account payment acceptance, offered at the moment you invoice rather than weeks later.

When a customer pays by card or by account-to-account transfer at the point of invoicing, settlement happens in a fraction of the time a Bacs cycle takes. The impact on DSO can be dramatic. In a Forrester study of commercial card acceptance, a B2B supplier that had been paid by bank transfer and cheque saw its DSO fall from 45 days to 15 once it began accepting cards, a reduction of roughly two-thirds.

The benefits go beyond speed:

You get paid faster, which frees up working capital you can put to use now rather than next month.

Your team chases less, because a payment taken at invoicing removes most of the follow-up work.

Your books reconcile cleanly, because the payment and the invoice are matched at the source rather than pieced together later.

Payments stop being an administrative afterthought and start being a lever you can actually pull on cash flow.

What moving beyond Bacs actually involves

Adding payment acceptance can sound like a heavy lift. In practice it is a well-trodden path, and knowing what to expect removes most of the friction.

A few things are worth understanding up front:

KYB and KYC checks. Before you can accept payments, a provider verifies your business (Know Your Business) and, where relevant, your customers (Know Your Customer). These checks exist to prevent fraud and meet regulation, and they are a standard part of onboarding.

Timelines. Verification takes time, though far less than most people expect when the paperwork is ready. Knowing this early keeps your launch on schedule.

Risk and compliance. The rules around payments are real, but they do not need to sit on your desk. A capable payments partner carries the regulatory and compliance weight so your team can stay focused on getting paid.

The takeaway is simple. Payments are more involved than a bank transfer, but the complexity is handled for you, not by you.

What getting paid faster looks like in the UK

The UK has its own payments rules, and a plan built for the US will not always translate.

In the UK, recurring collection runs on Direct Debit rather than the ACH system used in the US. Adding a surcharge to card payments is restricted here, so the commercial model looks different from the American one, and the card optimisation programmes common in the US market do not apply in the same way. None of this changes the goal. It simply means the route to getting paid faster is built for the UK market rather than borrowed from another one.

Getting paid faster inside the tools you already use

The best version of this change is the one your team barely notices.

Rather than logging into a separate portal or learning a new system, card and account payments can sit directly inside Quadient AR, in the same workflow your team already uses to raise and manage invoices. The invoice and the payment live in one place. Settlement is faster, the follow-up work shrinks, and your books stay clean, all without adding a step to anyone’s day.

Built to get you paid faster

Getting paid faster is not about working harder at collection. It is about giving your customers a faster way to pay and letting the system do the rest.

To make that possible, Quadient has partnered with Nuvei, a global payments provider, to bring card and account payment acceptance directly into Quadient AR. Nuvei’s infrastructure is built to power growth for businesses of every size, in every market they operate, so the same capability that helps a global enterprise get paid also works for you.

If getting paid faster is on your agenda for the year ahead, come and have a chat. We will show you what moving beyond Bacs could look like for your business.