Estimates based on an analysis of reported labor hours associated with taking payments from the survey Digital Transformation of SMBs: The Future of Commerce. Survey was commissioned by Visa and conducted by a third party research firm, Maru/Matchbox, during February and March 2018 and administered in English to 425 small and medium size businesses with storefront or at home business in food/dining, retail, services and grocery industries in the U.S.
The survey asked SMBs how much time was spent in a given week by all employees managing payments across activities associated with each payment method (digital vs. non-digital).*
- Non-digital payments tasks: Counting cash and reconciling accounting books, prepping and filing cash registers, getting cash and change ready for bank deposits, monitoring the cash box, identifying counterfeit notes, investigating why cash is missing, dealing with bounced checks, transporting cash and checks to and from the bank to make deposits or get change, and other non-digital payment-related activities.
- Digital payment tasks: Storing and filing card signature slips, card reconciliation (e.g. chargebacks), time spent keeping terminals secure, dealing with card fraud investigations, other card management related tasks, and other digital payment related activities.
The appropriate activities were aggregated to arrive at the total time spent on digital and non-digital payments. Time estimates were annualized. The number of hours needed to process in digital and non-digital payments were estimated by dividing the number of hours (digital and non-digital) by the revenue (digital and non-digital).The results were then multiplied by $100,000 to arrive at an estimate of the number of hours required to process $100,000 in payments.
* Q303: We’d now like you to consider the amount of time that you and your employees spend managing your payments. Below is a list of activities related to managing payments. Please estimate the amount of time spent in a typical week on each activity. Please answer in number of hours and minutes spent in total on payments processing across all of your sales channels and employees.