STEP 5, Consider Using The Reference Payments

Unfortunately the use of this kind of payments will not save you any costs! So why use them at all…

Reference payments are also known as structured payments, KID payments in Norway, OCR Payments in Denmark. Most countries have these kinds of payment, however they are called a lot of different things. It is common to them that the payment itself contains a reference to the invoice or the document. This can be the invoice number, a specific payment identification or similar.

Normally you will use the reference payment, because the invoice specifies to do so. In some countries you will not be able to pay the invoice without using the specific payment type with the payment identification specified as well. The payment will simply be refused by the bank.

In some cases you are able to pay the invoice without using the reference payment. Our recommendation is however to use the reference payments as much as you can. It costs you nothing (or at least very little), it is easy to do, and the receiver will be able to register your payment with less effort and with less risk of errors.

In few situations it actually cost you money. Normally your bank draws a small amount (depending on your bank agreement) each time you do a transfer. If you have a situation where you pay many invoices to the same vendor and you are localized in a country where the clearing system do not allow collecting reference payments, i.e. Denmark, Finland (only a few collections are allowed), The Netherland (only a few collections are allowed) and others, you are not allowed to collect invoices and need to transfer the reference payments to the vendor one by one. In this situation you will pay for each invoice. The transfer fee (domestic) is normally approx. EUR 0.2-0.5 per transaction.

In your enterprise you can consider changing your invoicing so your customers will be able to (or forced to) pay you with the reference payment as well. In this case you will be able to register your customer’s payments with less effort and errors. Many ERP-systems support the reference payments both ways, ingoing registration and outgoing payments, automatically. If not, you can always change your payment processes and use AMC-Banking.

In a later step we will cover, how we can automatize the incoming payment processes both structured and unstructured payments. AMC-Banking can of course do the auto match for you, whether your customers are paying you with structured or unstructured payments.