Bento Pay manages expenses for wedding planners

As we roll out Bento Pay, we’ve found it useful to explain to customers exactly how they can use it to control expenses and grow their businesses. This use case looks at expenses for wedding planners. Even if your business is completely different (maybe you’re a divorce lawyer?), this example might give you ideas for integrating Bento Pay into your work.

One day, one huge event

Let’s start with the obvious: a wedding involves a series of mission-critical events that come together at a specific date and time. It’s a huge day in the life of the couple and their family. It represents a major expense, and it’s freighted with emotions. If the officiant doesn’t show up, the wedding can’t take place. If the flowers arrive late, there may not be time to decorate the venue and distribute corsages to all of the aunts. Most of the guests might not notice, but the couple and their families sure will. There are many steps involved in pulling together a wedding, with expenses for wedding planners at each one.

A wedding calls for a lot of specialized vendors, like DJs, photographers, and make-up artists. Most of the vendors involved are also small businesses or sole proprietors, and let’s face it, some are more organized and have better invoicing processes than others. Many expect to paid upon delivery, which adds another thing to keep track of on a very busy day. 

Bento Pay makes this so easy! It uses email to send payments. It’s similar to the way you might already send payments to friends when splitting the check or to a friend who picked up a concert ticket for you. You send the vendor an email; the vendor then clicks on the link and authorizes Bento Pay to make a deposit to its bank account or to send funds to a one-time use Visa virtual card.

The consumer solutions aren’t designed for business

Bento Pay has several advantages over consumer systems that make it perfect for managing expenses for wedding planners (or divorce lawyers). Its security was designed for businesses. It integrates with QuickBooks to make financial reporting a breeze. And, like all Bento for Business payment products, Bento Pay lets you control who can make a payment and to what types of vendors they can pay. It then gives you reports to help you see where your money goes – in real time – so that you can make better forecasts and stronger bids. With a stronger view of your vendor relationships, you may be able to identify ways to negotiate costs or form partnerships.

And, because you can tag your transactions, you can tie an expense to a specific event. This makes it easy to manage several events from a single Bento account.

You can remove check preparation from your pre-event checklist. You don’t have to wait for vendors to send invoices. Your vendors don’t have to stalk their letter carrier. They get paid. You save time. The wedding goes off without a hitch and everyone lives happily ever after.

If you find yourself chasing down invoices, scrambling to have checks ready to give a vendor at delivery, or searching out a private place so that you can read your business credit card number off over the phone, you should give Bento Pay a try. Your expenses may be different than expenses for wedding planners, but we can help you manage them.