Implementing an Online Billing Solution

As banks and the rest of the financial services industry continues to evolve online systems and more and more individuals are comfortable using the web, as well as in using their smart phones and tablets to make a payment, all businesses have a tremendous opportunity to speed up their receivables process while lowering costs and improving efficiencies. This is best achieved by making as much of the electronic or digital technology that is readily available to us as possible (although we will need to determine exactly what this means of course).

There is no one-size-fit-all online billing system for every organization, as there will be many individual factors to be taken into account in every case. However, there are some common issues that need to be considered and it is these that we will look at in his brief article. In other words, having assembled a payments strategy and calculated the true cost of billing and collections, the next key question is therefore “what is the best way to go about implementing a more digitized approach to billing and payment for our customers?”

What are the Options?

There are several choices available to a merchant to start to issue bills electronically and to accept payments via the web. These include:
Migrating to an email and attachment based approach

• Adding a third-party payment system
• Building an online billing and payment solution (writing the software),
• Buying a third-party piece of software for online billing and payment,
• Outsourcing some or all of the billing and payment process to go more online
• Using a cloud-based pay-as-you-go online service (such as BillSwyft for example).

All of the above are viable options and the best is likely to be the last of these in cost-saving terms. However, each organization needs to make its own choice in terms of what it is ready to do.

 

Important Transition Considerations?
Whatever online option is finally selected in terms of how to render change to current billing and payment practices, there are several other issues or considerations for a merchant of any size or type to think about. These include:

Size and Type of the Enterprise

Although almost all organizations issue invoices or bills to some degree, some products or services are supplied only after payment is taken at the point of sale. Most retail businesses are a good example of this. However, where customers are allowed to pay for goods and services after they have been supplied or rendered, an invoice needs to be issued promptly and efficiently and ideally options for payment should be many and easy to use. Having said this some invoice volumes are so small that the work involved to send them and collect payment is easily absorbed in one person’s job role. In these circumstances large internally built or third-party software solutions are unlikely to be economic.

Branding/Marketing Issues

Any business will need to decide how much marketing control they want to have over the look and feel of both the bill and the payment page or pages. In some companies, this may not matter very much and a generic payment site may be fit for purpose. However, if a brand is important or even if a company wants to maintain a very similar look and feel (including use of logos etc.) then an internally built, purchased software solution or full digital service such as BillSwyft is likely to give a merchant the most customization potential. 

Website Monitoring and Availability

A critical component to any company’s desire to adopt a more digital billing and payment approach is ensuring that site availability to customers is high. A couple of typical metrics to include are therefore response time and website availability or uptime. Clearly an internally built system or purchased piece of software will need to be well-built and well-supported to be available as needed. 

Customer Service

Many considerations need to be fleshed out when deciding on what type of customer service is needed for a given merchant’s customers. For example, is the system going to be user-friendly to all people who may be interested in using it? do you need 24/7, 365 days a year availability? Do you require international payments? or can your system quickly find a payment transaction when needed (and can it communicate easily with the customer –via online means, when necessary)? 

PCI-Compliance and other Risk issues

As with accepting credit or debit card payments in person (or via a phone call), any merchant accepting cards as a payment type must ensure that they are in compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council’s rules. The PCI Security Standards Council offers comprehensive standards and supporting materials to enhance payment card data security. The PCI Data Security Standard includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures, such as card tokenization and encryption.  All of these factors need time and money to manage properly if building an internal solution but are often already party of any third-party site.

Costs/Fees

One other important issue to think about when accepting payments via the web is costs or fees. Many businesses which operate on low margins could see those margins deteriorate even more as credit or debit card fees (direct and indirect) would add an additional (and perhaps unnecessary) layer of cost. Although fees are payable to process payments with an internally developed or software-based solution, third-party providers can also charge a courtesy or convenience fee. All fees therefore need to be carefully scrutinized ahead of time so that there are no surprises when a monthly transactional statement is sent.

Finding and Using the Right Invoice Template

If you type “free invoice template” into the Google search engine you get about 40 million returned results. Clearly then there is a lot of interest in trying to find and use an effective invoice process (and ideally a cheap or free one) so in this article we will explore what is available and what options appear to deliver the greatest benefits.

Whether you are a one person business or a giant multi-national, getting an invoice to a customer is the beginning a long process in getting paid. Hence, it is important to get this invoice to a customer quickly (once a product has been supplied or service rendered) but it is equally critical that it is clear and encourages the earliest possible payment.

Fifty years ago, hand-written or simply typed invoices sent through the mail were the norm. Today, we have many other options (although these old-fashioned practices have far from disappeared completely). Perhaps the simplest of these is to use an pre-designed template and popular desk top applications like word for windows and an excel spreadsheet package both have several design alternatives to choose from. In both cases these provide a well-designed looking invoices and provide prompt space for particular customer names, address details, product or services provided and the cost involved. They even allow space for logos to be added if desired. 

Outside the standard templates of desktop applications, there are many relatively cheap and even free software packages which allow invoices to be generated. These work in similar ways to desktop templates but may also generate sequential numbers and allow better storage and retrieval (and avoid the mistake prone process of overtyping the last invoice that was typed).

In both of the above alternatives, the problem is that despite the fact that the invoice can be sent by email as an attachment is still only received as a piece of paper (which the customer can do little with when they receive it and may only print in order to later pay in any case).  As a result, perhaps the best alternative of all is to use a bill presentment service which renders the invoice as a full digital bill. This allows individuals to click on an electronic bill at a web site (ideally rendered in graphical form as they would expect to see it as it appears when posted) and either reveal more bill detail, store it, end it on to someone else to review and most importantly to pay it.

For example, at the PaySwyft web site (www.payswyft.com) sole traders, partnership and companies or all sizes can click on the “free invoice template link” on the home page and use the system to generate an invoice at no cost whatsoever. Like the options described above it provides an clear and clean process for entering invoice details but this is rendered as a full digital bill, meaning that it can be clicked on dynamically to see as much detail as has been entered and perhaps more importantly, it can be paid from within the browser, also electronically. The added bonus here is that the single invoice can then be used (when saved) as a template to generate future invoices much more quickly (because a logo has been added and the design of the overall invoice is relatively set).

What is the real cost of paper-based versus electronic billing

This might seem to be quite a simple question at face value but when we think about it, the answer is not exactly a straightforward one. This is because we are not always aware of the real costs of performing this quite complex task in all of its steps. In addition, while direct or tangible costs are relatively easy to identify, indirect costs are less easily identifiable and some of these are often very well hidden. Let’s therefore look at what tends to fall into these three categories of costs when comparing traditional paper-based billing versus full on-line or digital billing.

Direct Costs
At face value most people would estimate that a few “direct” costs are involved in paper-based billing. These may include:
•Invoice bill/file preparation/printing
•Paper invoices/bills
•Printing (ink or cartridge replacement)
•Envelopes
•Postage/Franking
•Offering basic payment options (debit, credit, other at standard fees)
Costs will fall as bill volumes increase for most of the above but even if they do postage or franking at about £0.40 to £0.45 pence will always be the biggest fee here. And the others will typically add as much as 30 to 35 pence making for a total of £0.70 to £0.80 of direct costs. Of course, if a merchant emails invoices (with a PDF attachment), instead of physically mailing them this may fall in half perhaps.

Indirect Costs
Costs are often deemed to be “indirect” because they are either fixed and/or cannot be wholly charged to the billing costs (especially if it is only part of a person’s job). However, even proportional costs add up here. Indirect costs may include:
•Customer service manpower to handle calls/queries
•Accounting/Reconciliation manpower
•Lost invoices (and the time taken to deal with this)
•Undelivered bills (and the time taken to deal with this)
•The cost of bill storage (space rental or fixed costs)
•Bill query handling time
Once again there may be some economies of scale in the above but all of these items (except bill storage perhaps) mainly involve having staff on the payroll or at call. Even at 500 bills a month, at least quarter a person would typically be involved in issuing and reconciling invoices and another quarter in handling queries, re-issuing bills or handling “special requests” related to invoicing or payments. If the cost of this person (or two part-timers) were £12,000 a year (£8,000 plus 50% salary/overhead burden) or £6,000 each, this £1,000 a month would amount to £2 per bill.

Hidden Costs
Costs are often deemed to be “hidden” because no-one is scrutinising or controlling them (they go unmeasured or unaccounted for or are lost in general overhead or the broad costs of doing business). Hidden costs may include:
•Extra or hidden payment transaction fees (which may be fixed or higher than necessary)
•Invoice/billing run or payment processing errors
•The need for a higher than wanted or necessary float/overdraft at the bank
•Possible added customers or more business from having more payment options
•Quicker settlement/cycle time (by use of SMS or email alerts)
•Easier training of staff/opportunity to focus staff elsewhere with time saved
•Potential cash-flow acceleration
•Easier/cheaper compliance and audit work with digital billing
•Lower/No cost digital marketing opportunities
•Overall incremental "Green" benefits/credits

The benefits to an organisation of the long list above are obviously much harder to calculate but a variety of studies in recent years have suggested that these can conservatively add up to as much as 3-4% of revenues or as much as 15% of profit. If we assume our little company doing 500 bills a month has an average transaction or “ticket” value of £40, turnover per month is £20,000 or £240,000 per annum. If we assume that profit is 15% of this or £36,000, this all means that the cost per bill is somewhere between £0.90 to £1.20.

So in summary, if we add all of these costs together which have a total traditional or paper-based billing cost of £3.60 to £4 or 9.5% of the revenue collected each time (£40 average ticket value). Now that’s a quite a serious amount of money for this little company not to take pretty seriously! But what about your company?-what is 9.5% of your revenues? And when you have calculated it in cold hard cash, can you afford not to investigate the potential to save as much as half of this as recurrent savings every year by moving to digital billing?

Developing a Payment Strategy-Step 5- Building a seamless payments process.

In exploring what is involved in developing an overall payments strategy, in this fifth and final article in the series we will look at building a seamless payments process.

There is no “one-size-fit-all” payment strategy for every organisation, as there will be many individual factors to be taken into account in every case, and this is likely to affect the choices made. However, one aspect about a payments process appears to have almost universal appeal when it comes to customers-they want a “seamless” experience as much as possible. “Seamless” means without joins or to be continuous or even “flowing” from one stage in the process to the next. For a payments process this entails that every step needs to flow in this smooth way to ensure that the customer experience is a straightforward and relatively painless one (given that few people probably like actually paying bills).

Research again and again confirms that flexibility and choice should be a major driver in making the customer experience a positive one, when it comes to rendering payment and the web can now deliver much of this with a little careful pre-planning. In practice, this suggests that the entire payment strategy can be centred around an Internet web site (whether this is in-house or an third-party one). On this site, all the payments process steps of issuing the invoice, offering various payment channels, taking different kinds of payments, reconciling payments to invoices, banking the payments and accounting for the whole payment transaction are possible-a one-stop shop. Of course, some customers either will not or cannot transact on the web and the organisation may therefore have to continue to physically send, email or SMS invoices and even accept telephone based or postal payments. The key issue here however is that this population of customers can be kept to a minimum and encouraged to transition over time. For example, those people making telephone payments can be shown how easy it is to do make the same recurrent payment online (especially when the convenience of doing so 24/7 and 365 days a year is appreciated and not just when call centre lines are open for instance).

In summary then, all organisations of all sizes and types should develop and continue to hone a payments strategy that offers more flexibility and choice to customers. In the chosen approach, being fast and efficient in making the bill available is critical, as is making the whole experience as user-friendly as possible. By doing this, an organisation will usually get the change pioneers and early adopters to experiment with the new approach, and it is their experience that that will have a “viral” influence on those customers who do not like to be the first to try new things. Organisations therefore have to be patient and take a long-term view, but in doing so, can drive both bill presentment and payment acceptance costs down substantially.

Developing a Payment Strategy-Step 2- Focusing on how to issue bills and invoices in a fast and efficiency way

In exploring what is involved in developing an overall payments strategy, in this article we will look at the second phase of five in total, which is how a business can issue bills and invoices in a the fastest and most efficiency way.

There are few businesses that fail to readily appreciate that when a customer orders a product or service, they expect to have it delivered as efficiently as possible (and this usually means fast). In fact, some organisations even seek to gain competitive advantage by doing this effectively. However, this would be costly unless the invoicing process is equally efficient, so that payment can be collected as quickly as possible. Streamlining the billing process is therefore a critical activity.

There are essentially three options available to streamline the billing process:

First, a business can seek to make an existing manual bill process “flow” more efficiently. For example, this might involve looking at the simplicity of the invoice design or layout, reducing or even eliminating wasteful work tasks, or even further automating the delivery process (such as faster envelope stuffing). Although this may help considerably, the danger is that these process improvements need to be “locked in” to avoid slippage and the changes may only go a short way in terms of overall improvement from a customer perspective.

A second option is to automate the manual billing process as much as possible. For example, this might involve adopting an email-based invoice delivery process (saving on paper, envelopes and franking (if the customer can be convinced to accept an email as the substitute of course). This can save considerably in direct costs and gets the bill to the customer earlier than the physical mail. However, the business is still delivering paper and may not experience much in the way of faster payment. In fact many organisations find that they end up maintaining both their physical mailing and emailing process (and storing more paper than they did before).

A third option is for a business is to let a third-party specialist billing organisation help to streamline the process. One possibility here is to completely outsource the process of both billing and payment collection. However, a more popular option is to either buy full bill automation software from the third-party (and pay for its maintenance and use) or to use a digital billing service. The latter choice is likely to deliver the most change from a customer perspective. Here, a customer’s bill is made available to view at the third party’s dedicated web site, where they can then pay it by a variety of means (on both the credit and debit side).

Each of the above options needs careful consideration, as all three involve time and cost. However, in terms of savings in direct and indirect cost, option three is likely to be the most efficient and cost effective.

In our next article in this series, we will look at the next phase in developing the Payment Strategy- Giving customers as user-friendly billing and payment experience as possible.

Developing a Payment Strategy-Step 1-Appreciating why it critical to have a payments strategy?

This blog article seeks to explore what is involved in developing a payments strategy and it will therefore look in more detail at the first phase of five in total, which is determining why it is critical to have a payments strategy at all.

First of all let’s just define what the payments strategy needs to encompass and then determine why this is so important.

All businesses know that continuing revenue or positive cash-flow is their “life-blood” but few of these have a strategy or even a loose plan to ensure that this keeps flowing appropriately (by which we mean steadily and at a greater rate than costs are incurred). Revenue (as opposed to money from borrowings or equity) only comes in when a business bills for its products and services to its customers and when it receives payment in its bank account. As a result, the process that is used for up-front billing all the way through to the steps to finally collect payment need to operate efficiently and effectively-and this is not something that you want to simply let evolve (or leave to chance).

Whatever its size, a business should spend just as much time on its Payments strategy as it does on its Marketing strategy or Operations strategy. This is simply because all three of these strategies have to work together in order to be successful. Marketing and Sales create demand and get customers to buy in the first place (and will usually spend up-front money in doing so). Operations will fulfil the demand by delivering goods and services (once again spending money to do so). Finally then Accounting and Finance are charged with collecting money from customers, but need to do so in the best possible way (with as much choice as possible) and fast enough to ensure that money is well managed at all times (however seasonal or “lumpy” sales might be).

The first step in developing a Payments strategy, that balances all if the above well, is to understand the full billing to payment cycle. This cycle typically includes: preparing the invoice, issuing the invoice, offering payment channels, taking different kinds of payments, reconciling payments to invoices, banking payments and accounting for the whole payment transaction. In addition to these 7 core steps it might also include, tracking invoice and payment progress, dealing with queries and complaints and producing analysis and reports on payment transactions. Every one of these steps is a significant process by itself and therefore needs to operate smoothly on a stand-alone basis and as part of the overall process. A good Payment Strategy will therefore seek to specify how this can best be done at each step and in an overall manner.

In our next article in this series of five we will look at the next phase in developing the Payment Strategy- how to issue bills and invoices in a fast and efficiency way.

What do Postal Price Rises Really Mean for Billing Costs?

It was recently announced that a first-class stamp in the UK will rise in price from 46p to 60p (a 30% increase) and a second-class stamp will go up from 36p to 50p (a 39% increase). This reflects a worldwide trend in postal prices increasing dramatically (as less and less letters are sent in the mail and therefore make the post office burden so much harder to cover) and causing those businesses which bill their customers in the mail to have to bear the extra costs. For a larger biller (perhaps doing 50,000 bills a month) this adds £84,000 p.a and for a small business (doing say 2,500 bills a month) it adds £4,200.

These are significant relative costs in a channel that already presents additional challenges for merchants over other options. This includes the need to have to print and fold invoices and have to stuff them into envelopes, wait the 2-3 days until they are delivered (excepting a small percentage that never reach the customer’s given address!) and even get lost somewhere along the delivery route (and therefore have to be resent). Postal delays, go-slows and strikes can also impact significantly on businesses, and none of these factors does anything to help critical cash-flow (assuming that the customer does not lose their paper invoice and manages to pay on time).

So, what can businesses do about yet more costs that have to be absorbed in these difficult economic times? The obvious answer is to ask customers to accept an online invoice and cut out paper and envelopes and all mail costs completely. In the above two examples this not only removes the respective £300,000 and £15,000 annual postal costs completely, but by the time you add in the extra internal costs of printing, folding, stuffing, and envelopes probably saves twice as much-or around £600,000 and £30,000.

Unfortunately, if the above step of switching to ebilling were easy, every business of any size or type would be doing it. In reality, the inhibitors have historically been many including the often immediately prohibitive need to spend up-front capital on ebilling software (and pay annually to maintain it). In addition, the introduction of a new online billing system typically disrupts normal operations for months (often costing significant time and money) in order to transition to the new approach (not forgetting that customers also have to be converted to use the new system too). This all assumes that you have the customer email addresses to which you can send the bills or invoices of course. In the past, these kind of inhibitors have added too much cost and/or hassle for most businesses and they have no choice but to stay with their traditional way of doing things-until now that is.

In recent years, third-party online ebilling portals like PaySwyft for example, have been developed which overcome many of the problems described above. First and foremost this kind of portal offers almost an immediate opportunity to send full digital invoices to customers (often within days of signing up to use this “cloud-based” service) and on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning there is no need for any capital outlay or annual software maintenance costs. And because every merchant has a unique merchant number or ID, customers can go to the portal to pay a bill without a business having to know their email address. Customers can then pay instantly, or register at the site (which means that a business progressively “scrapes” the email address for customers (who will often want to use their email or SMS alerts to remind them when bills are due). This means that customers can be weaned slowly but surely away from paper over time, as they become increasingly comfortable that all their bills are stored, emailable and printable whenever they like, and they can therefore safely turn off the paper bill they get in the mail. Best of all, the business not only starts to save the cost of sending paper bills and the postage costs but gains the added advantage of having a fully integrated set of payment options (often greater in diversity than they offered previously) that are now available (such as every credit card for instance). This aids cash-flow, lessens calls to the business to pay by phone and massively helps bill and payment reconciliation.

Summary
The transition to online billing is always a challenge but by using a portal-based system hosted in the cloud, it is many times easier than it was and can almost immediately start to save substantial time and cost. And now that postal expensive are going up so significantly, all businesses have even more reason to therefore consider making the change now.

Will an “iTunes” Type of Web site for ebilling Ever Come into Being?

Last month an interesting article was published on a blog which made a very useful reference to on line music, and iTunes in particular, in relation to ebilling. In his article the author suggested that if we thought about bills in music terms:
• CDs (and the artists that produce them) are like paper bills;
• Listening to music online is like logging in to a portal to view and pay your bill; and
• Downloading a song (file) to your chosen device from iTunes is like receiving your bill as a file (attachment) to your PC, tablet, iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc.

This article rather strangely goes on to conclude that all music and bills should be delivered by email attachment so that customers can open it/them on all their different listening or reading devices.

Despite that fact that this article seems to get a little lost quite quickly, it does draw a useful general analogy and it is therefore worth looking at the core question that it hints at but never answers-will an iTunes type of web site for ebilling ever come into being (and how of course)?

First and foremost let’s get the comparisons right here:
• Songs (or “albums” of songs) should be compared to bills in general
• Artists should be compared to merchants (and some of both are very large and some are tiny)
• Record companies should be compared to banks
• Music listeners should be compared to customers or bill payers
• CD’s (or Vinyl) should be compared to paper-delivered bills
• Online Audio type files (MP3’s, WAVs etc) should be compared to online emails with attachments
• An online store (like iTunes) should be compared to an online bill-payment portal

You’ll notice that we do not yet talk about a delivery device like a smart phone or tablet in the above table-we’ll cover this later.

The Music Scene
If we look back at recent history, up until as little as 10 years ago, the music industry had been operating in similar fashion for decades. Artists produced songs and approached record companies to back them. If they were successful, the record company would help getting the song(s) to market on vinyl as a single or a long play record, getting the songs played on radio and elsewhere so that people would buy what they liked in main street record stores. Innovation in the music industry was very slow to come. Vinyl eventually became CD’s and radio went slowly from analogue to digital. However, the biggest changes were in listening devices, which became increasingly portable. This was led by Sony’s “Walkman” in 1979-the first step towards MP3 players which led to the huge industry paradigm shift-the iPod-introduced in late 2001 (and the new iTunes music store two years later in 2003).

When Apple arrived on the music scene the portable MP3 scene was ripe for change to something simpler and more appealing to customers. In this sense, the iPod, iTouch and finally the iphone and iPad all became the simplest and most user-friendly way to listen to music (both on a live streaming basis and recorded). As a result, the music industry has been almost completely transformed commercially and listeners (or at least those with a 3G/4G connection and/or access to the Internet) have more choice and convenience than they ever had before.

The Billing Scene
So how does this compare to the billing sector? Like music, billing has operating in similar ways for decades. Bills (the song comparison) have been and still are delivered mostly in very traditional ways, especially by small and medium sized merchants (the artist comparison). This is by paper in the mail as the simplest format (a bit like the vinyl single) or by mail with a plain PDF attachment (the CD comparison). In some cases, the email with attachment may be a little more dynamic and sophisticated and can collect signatures for example (used in the B2B billing world). This is more comparable to the MP3 or wav files in the music world.

Although a dominant player like Apple and a site like iTunes has yet to “explode” in the billing world, we are getting very close to it happening now. For some years, online bill payment has been available at a merchant’s web site, although this does make for some inconvenience for customers when they need to pay a lot of bills (or listen to a lot of songs from different artists at different record companies). Online bill payment has also been available at bank sites for many years now and has become quite well-used by the same people who took quickly to Internet banking. Unfortunately, full digital presentment is not normally available via this channel, so both of these valuable innovations are comparable to the “Walkman”-they have taken us some of the way but there is room for improvement.

The private “cloud-based” bill presentment and payment portal is a much newer innovation in the last 2-3 years, and is much closer to being the billing “paradigm shift” we talked about earlier. In this system, customers can see bills from a given merchant (an artist in music terms) and subscribe to get all the bills they send (or songs they release). Because this is non-merchant owned or bank owned (the equivalent of sometimes cutting out the record companies), customers can see many merchants (or artists), and thus have the capacity to ultimately start to see all of their bills in one place. Naturally, paying bills is never a fun activity like listening to music but the quicker and more easily you can deal with them the better (and you can get back to what you like doing much more speedily). Having all your bills in one online place (with free back and storage and easy retrieval whenever you need access) is the equivalent of getting all of their songs in one playbook-just as iTunes allows now. Customers can then keep these bills (or songs) permanently stored in one place and revisit them whenever they like. These bills are all fully digital and do not have multiple file formats that have to be tackled (much as Apple made MP3, WAV and other music file formats an irrelevance to the listener).

Perhaps most importantly, customers can access their bills at the portal from any device that is connected to the Internet by some means-a computer, a smart phone, a tablet etc. And because this is all digital, customers can use all of the currently available and evolving technology that is available such as bookmarking, flexible sorting (like assembling playlists) and using SMS alerts for example (to prompt the customer when there is a bill to pay or a credit card to update, just as you would when a new song or album by an artist has been released). Of course this is not to exclude other ways of getting a bill in any other format that may be wanted-you can still send an email or a PDF or even print them if you like.

Summary
We are not suggesting that bills are anywhere near as much fun to ‘access’ as music and you will of course listen to the same song a lot more than you will use the same bill. However, we think the broad analogy here is a useful one. Our general conclusion is that the online bill presentment and payment portal is already here and like iTunes will transform the bill payment sector over the next few years just as Apple did. There are a few innovative companies that are competing to be the “big gorilla” at the moment but it is inevitable that one of these will emerge soon as the dominant player in this space. A few early adopters (the merchants or artists as they would be in the music scene) already understand this and are quickly getting on board. For these merchants this is a relatively painless transition, with no capital outlay and they can be in the online bill presentment and payment space almost immediately to reap the benefits.