So having resolved how the money is to be processed, next how are you going to keep track of those transactions within your business? If, for example, you are a seasonal business, processing credit cards can become a major bottleneck; therefore a back-end facility to process credit cards transactions online is absolutely vital, especially with the growth of online purchasing. Some means of organising your payment processing is essential if you are to keep track of your money.

This is where an order processing system becomes especially valuable. An order processing system is usually a piece of software you either install on your own pc or use remotely via an online service. Such software integrates the management of transactions with many of the other aspects of running a business which we will discuss later. One such system is TOPS© - an acronym for "The Order Processing Solution". TOPS© is designed specifically for the small mail order business, whereas many of the other order processing systems are designed for much larger concerns and are therefore more expensive and often time consuming to learn how to use.

Within the TOPS© system managing your payment processing is much simplified - credit cards details are batched according to when the relevant goods are to be despatched. Ideally you would process each batch on the day before the goods are being sent out. On that day you would simply 'click the button' and the batch would be processed! Of course should you have any incorrect credit card numbers or 'expiry dates' that have, these would be thrown up for reprocessing. No doubt if the customers are well known to you, you would still despatch the goods and resolve the issue meantime. Apart from the very great time saving facility of processing credit cards online via the TOPS© batch processing facility, within the TOPS© system you can keep track on all other payments be they cash / cheques / BACs / manual cards or "auto cards" - i.e. those credit card payments which have already been processed online through your web shopping cart.

Reconciliation is an essential aspect of your payment processing system. When entering an order into the TOPS© system you simply put the payment into whichever is the appropriate batch, or create an appropriate batch for the date when the funds will reach the bank. TOPS© can be made to synchronise with your bank statement - so when you statement arrives you can easily cross check that all is in agreement.

If yours is a business where your clients are perhaps a little older and they send you cheques, it helps if you can easily print out a list of all the cheques when you take them to the bank and attach this to your paying-in slip. TOPS© can do this for you. It gives you great confidence to see a reconciled bank statement! Should you forget to process any kind of payment within TOPS©, the system will always remind you - so you can sleep easily in your bed at night - confident that the system's maths might be very much better than yours when you are pushed for time and knowing that the TOPS© batching system is foolproof and you may not lose either a payment or an order!