Virtual accounts
Dealing with thousands of deposits and withdrawals every day involves a great deal of administrative work for many companies. Virtual accounts offer an efficient solution that simplifies the control of payment transactions, reduces complexity and minimises the risk of incorrect bookings.
23. September 2024 | Reading time 5 minutes
For tenants, the situation is clear: they transfer their rent to the property manager at the beginning of the month. But what about the other side of the coin, the large property management companies? The bureaucratic burden of a large number of contracts and payment transactions, with monthly deposits from tenants and simultaneous outgoing payments for water, heating and electricity, is immense. If tenants also had their own payment accounts – which was the case not so long ago – a huge number of accounts would have to be managed with a flood of bookings. Virtual accounts are a good solution to the challenge of managing a fragmented payment business with a huge number of incoming and outgoing payments while at the same time dealing with a rapidly growing housing stock. A virtual account is regularly addressed using IBAN and BIC, but is not opened in the banking system.
Payments are automatically assigned
In concrete terms, based on the example: tenants transfer the rent to an individual virtual account. This makes it clear whether the rent is paid on time and in the correct amount. However, all virtual accounts are assigned to a real account. This means that the transactions that take place on the virtual accounts are immediately credited to or debited from the real account. Automatic assignment of payments in financial accounting takes place via electronic account statement information.
Efficient solutions for granular payment transactions
Virtual accounts are becoming increasingly important due to the advance of digitalisation and the simultaneous granularisation of payment transactions. And not only in the real estate industry, but also in other sectors, such as healthcare. In this area, service providers manage parts of the payment transactions for pharmacies and large hospitals, for example, and control receivables management with their customers. Pharmacies are particularly in demand when it comes to the outpatient supply of medicines. Here, solutions are needed that ensure smooth processes and appropriate communication with customers. For example, the company creates and sends transparent invoices on behalf of the clinics, including prescription copies, invoice duplicates and transfer forms for the prompt settlement of outstanding amounts. Thanks to virtual accounts, all customer payments are directly assigned to specific pharmacies.
With the help of virtual accounts, cash flows can be managed much more efficiently today.
Stefanie Buhtz, Team Head of Cash Management Sales
Optimised accounting and simplified posting
The use of virtual accounts can offer corporate customers and their treasury departments enormous advantages: the automatic allocation of payments optimises accounting, and posting is easier, faster and error-free. With virtual accounts, incorrect postings or tedious searches for specific credit and debit memos are a thing of the past.