PUSH Billing - Another Option
Written by Scott Koegler
Monday, 04 December 2006
There is a segment of electronic billing and payment that exists as a
separate area between the more formal EDI and the less formal eInvoicing. The company
Striata (www.striata.com) offers an advanced service it calls PUSH e-billing that offers
simplicity in electronic bill presentment and payment, or EBPP.
I spoke with Striata's COO, Garin Toren about the company's offerings:
 How does Striata's offering differ from EDI
and eInvoicing?
Garin Toren
- We see electronic invoicing and payment as a pyramid.
At the top of the pyramid is EDI, with its one-to-one relationships, high value
and high volume transactions. At the lower end of the scale is the eInvoicing world
with its less formal relationships.
We address the middle layers that service those customers that are not large enough to need EDI but can use tools
to simplify their billing and payment collection operations.
What is the essence of Striata's service?
Garin Toren -
Striata allows businesses that have many customers to present their invoices via email. These companies
tend to have too many small relationships for the typical EDI setup. They can send encrypted emails to
their customers in a variety of formats. And the customers can incorporate the invoice data into their
own processes however they prefer.
What formats are offered?
Garin Toren -
By far the most popular format for bills is PDF along with a CSV data file. But we offer a variety of
formats that the company can send depending on their particular needs. For example our customer CPS
Energy in San Antonio, TX supplies power to the San Antonio School District. They had been sending over
600 paper bills that had to be mailed and then routed to the proper locations for payment. We were able
to eliminate the paper process for them. The school district now receives only 10 emails, each containing
only the data required for the particular area of responsibility.
We can also provide HTML or XML format files for the viewable bill, and can deliver nearly whatever format
data file needed including SAP and ASCII. But we have found that the standard CSV file is nearly universal
and offers the most flexibility to the end customer who may want to import the information into a variety
of applications for various purposes.
You mentioned that Striata also enables the payment
process. What did you mean by that?
Garin Toren -
We've done some unique things with our PDF documents. The recipient gets an encrypted PDF document, and once
they decrypt it, they get a fully navigable document with an embedded data file. From there, the user can
complete the payment by simply clicking on a button within the form.
The form shows the details of the bill and defaults the payment to the full amount of the invoice, which
the user can change if necessary. Once they click the "Pay" button on the form, a secure connection is made
to our transaction processor. This eliminates the need to log in to a web site and makes the process very simple.
We've seen a large number of web-based payment
systems. Isn't this similar to those?
Garin Toren -
No doubt that millions of dollars have been spent on web portals that can process payments, but we have found
that most businesses, and even users, tend to avoid logging in to portals to pay one bill. It's just too
complex to have to remember login information for every bill you have to pay, particularly for the small and
medium sized business. It's a different story if you're working with and EDI implementation that can be
mandated by the customer. The supplier has to abide by the customer's requirements whether it's to create an
invoice or make a payment. This process is simple and self-contained.
How is the system priced?
Garin Toren -
Our pricing is based on a sliding scale, and we have customers that send as few as five thousand and as many as
millions of invoices each month. Not only that, the documents range in size from a single page to multiple pages.
In addition to the per-document fee, we have an implementation fee and an annual service agreement. What we
can say with certainty is that Striata will reduce the printing and postage costs by anywhere from 60% to 95%
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Why choose Striata?
Flexible
Configurable
Multi-channel
Cross platform
Levels of control
Extensive reporting
Read further »
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