After the e-commerce platform I was responsible for had a certain scale, it began to have problems such as too much financial manual accounting workload, so it was decided to upgrade it to the entire system to realize the online settlement process. This article will analyze the relevant product requirements, research processes, and final implementation plans with you.
01 Mall Account Sharing and Settlement
We are a community e-commerce company. The products are provided by the farm and sold on the platform. They are mainly promoted and sold by the community group leader. The model can be defined as B2C2C: supplier-distributor-end user.
When the user purchases vegetables from a farm on the platform, the order will calculate the logistics cost. After removing the logistics costs, after the user confirms receipt of the goods, the remaining funds will be divided into proportion between suppliers, distributors and platforms. This is the process of sharing the accounts.
We will also dynamically adjust the platform fee ratio according to the supplier's monthly sales. The higher the distributor's sales, the higher the commission rewards. The fees paid by
users are set to T+1 on the channel to automatically withdraw them to our company's corporate account. After the system calculates the income of the account splitter based on the order, our operations will be reviewed. After the general manager signs and confirms, the finance department will transfer the income of each party from the company to the public account to the other party’s bank account at a frequency of twice a week in the form of bank transfers. After completing the transfer, a message will be pushed to all parties in the system to prompt them to have arrived. The process of paying the goods to suppliers and paying commissions to distributors is called settlement.
Settlement: refers to summarizing and accounting of all income and expenditures in a certain period. It can be the settlement of payment and commission, it can be the platform to pay money to merchants, or it can be the merchant to pay money to platform (such as commission rebate).
02 Implementation Solution
Due to the large degree of manual intervention in our settlement process, high labor costs and slow speed, suppliers often come to complain that we are not settled in time, and even make mistakes. So we decided to adopt a full online settlement process. If the e-commerce platform of
to C needs to be settled with suppliers, there are generally five underlying solutions:
1. Bank split
cooperates with the bank to open a regulatory account, and then splits the accounts through the bank split interface. The more famous solutions include Ping An Bank 's Witness Bao and CITIC Bank's e-commerce manager.
Because the development of payment system and the connection with the banking system are time-consuming and labor-intensive, some companies such as Ping++ and Weijin first connect with banks, Alipay , WeChat , etc., implement a payment and accounting platform, and then sell the system specifically, so that e-commerce platforms can realize accounting sharing and reduce some trivial matters.
Most banks do not actually provide inter-company accounting services that are not the same entity. The remaining supported banks generally require companies to have one of the ICP/EDI certificates. For e-commerce companies in mainland China, ICP certificates are relatively easy to obtain.
ICP certificate: Internet Content Provider, that is, a telecom operator that provides comprehensive Internet information services and value-added services to the majority of users. The certificate that it must have is ICP certificate . ICP Certificate refers to the "Telecommunication and Information Service Business License of the People's Republic of China" issued by local communications management departments. note that the ICP certificate is not the same as the ICP filing under the website you see.
EDI certificate: Electronic Data Interchange, full name is value-added telecommunications service operation license - online data processing and transaction processing business, belongs to the category of B21 value-added telecommunications services. It specifically refers to the use of various data and transaction and transaction processing application platforms connected to the communication network to provide users with online data processing, transaction and transaction processing services through the communication network.
2. Third-party payment company split
cooperates with third-party payment companies. Such companies hold Internet payment licenses and already have bank regulatory accounts, so they can directly access their ready-made payment split system.
is generally affected by the "interconnection" policy of payment channels, such as the WeChat Pay disconnection incident in 2019, and Alipay also did not provide APP payment interface to third-party payment companies.
This means that after using this solution, your platform may not be able to support APP to invoke Alipay and WeChat payment. Although there are some technical solutions that can be solved, the user experience is still very poor.
3. WeChat/Alipay official website split
If your own platform only needs to support WeChat H5 and WeChat mini-programs, there is no APP, and you don’t need to consider Alipay payment, you can also use WeChat’s split plan. Alipay should have a similar solution, but I think very few companies will only consider Alipay scenarios.
Picture: Alipay Account Division Introduction
Whether Alipay or WeChat Account Division, both parties involved in the account division need to have corresponding Alipay and WeChat payment accounts. If the partner is some traditional supply-side companies, the other party may have to register one first.
In addition, to use Alipay or WeChat account sharing function, our company also needs to have certain qualifications. For example, when I learned about WeChat account sharing, I only provided internal testing to WeChat service providers at that time. At that time, we were not a service provider, let alone qualified for internal testing.
WeChat service provider split: https://pay.weixin.qq.com/wiki/doc/api/allocation_sl.php?chapter=24_4index=4
Alipay merchant split: https://opendocs.alipay.com/mini/introduce/splitbill
4. Bank-enterprise direct connection
cooperates with banks to open the bank-enterprise direct connection system, withdraw the income of Alipay and WeChat to the company's corporate account, and then the system requests the bank to transfer funds to different suppliers.
China Merchants Bank Bank-enterprise direct connection system: https://u.ebank.cmbchina.com/CmbBank_GenShell/UI/Help/DCBank2/Guide.aspx?Solution#t4
Bank-enterprise direct connection needs to cooperate with the company's public account. If a bank-enterprise direct connection solution is finally selected, the company needs to have/open a public account in the bank. In order to facilitate the system to connect, it is recommended to bind the public account to the company's external business Alipay/WeChat account.
The direct connection system interfaces of major banks are generally more secure and safe, and it is much more difficult to connect to the Internet than those Internet-based solutions. Moreover, the bank's requirements for receiving bank cards may affect the user's experience of binding cards.
5. Manual mode
finance accounts according to ERP's order records and payment channels, and transfers funds to suppliers regularly. This move undoubtedly wastes manpower and material resources, and takes a long time, so it is naturally unfriendly to suppliers. However, when most companies are not in scale, or when the small-scale businesses of large companies or traditional non-Internet businesses, they still use this model in large quantities. We do not discuss the quality of this model and the future trends. For many companies, this model has reasonable reasons. For us, it is the opportunity to convert humans into system operations.
03 Our choice
After communicating with multiple banks and third-party payment institutions, we finally adopted the bank-enterprise direct connection model after considering a lot. There are generally two types of direct connection modes for bank-enterprise, front-end (also known as proxy server) mode and embedded mode. Which model to use for
to connect with direct connections between banks and enterprises? I don’t think it is a simple technical issue. I think it has a lot to do with the product form. In addition, some banks may only continue or maintain one of the solutions, which will also become a prerequisite for choice.
Bank-enterprise direct connection expansion reading: https://wiki.mbalib.com/wiki/%E9%93%B6%E4%BC%81%E7%9B%B4%E8%81%94
If your ERP system is deployed in the cloud and accessed through the browser, it is recommended to choose the front-end mode.
Bank-enterprise direct connections also have public network and dedicated line modes, which depends on the company's financial resources.
final plan:
04 Process introduction
1. User payment
We have received Alipay, WeChat, and UnionPay payment, realizing full-scene payment of APP, H5, WeChat public account , WeChat mini program, and Alipay life account.
2. Channel fund withdrawal
This is the prerequisite for achieving subsequent direct bank-enterprise account split. First, set the money to automatically settle T+1 from the company's Alipay, WeChat, and UnionPay accounts to the same corporate account of the company.
3. Reconciliation and Accounting
In fact, when users place an order, we know the share ratio of suppliers, platforms, logistics, and distributors. This step has two purposes:
- Reconciliation: Ensure that the revenue calculated by the system is consistent with the channel and the actual revenue of the public account. Alipay, WeChat, UnionPay and other channels have T+1 reconciliation interfaces, while the bank-enterprise direct connection system has an interface for account verification, ensuring that the three are consistent through local business orders, payment channel bills, and bank revenue and expenditure records.
- ladder splitting: We have signed a plan for commission based on sales volume ladder splitting with some suppliers, and this step updates the splitting ratio.
4. The business system applies for settlement with OA
This step does not allow the business system to directly connect with the bank-enterprise direct connection system, but places the bank-enterprise direct connection system behind the company's internal OA, which ensures the security of the capital system and can use OA to achieve business and financial integration of all the company's businesses (referred to as "business and financial integration"). In addition, there is still a leader's approval flow in the OA system. We designed this approval flow as much as possible into the most streamlined model. Because of the system's automatic reconciliation and sharing of accounts, many approval nodes for offline payments have been replaced.
5. Bank front machine
This step is mainly used to realize encryption and security authentication for communication with the banking system, and belongs to the system automation process.
6. Finance confirms the withdrawal in online banking
Finance sees in the bank's online banking system that there are orders pushed by OA, insert the U shield and enter the password to complete the withdrawal.
Some large enterprises can all omit this step after the system is stable. After a mature and reliable system and a certain early warning mechanism, this step will actually be phased out. As far as I know, many banks have indeed removed this step, and the withdrawal has become an order from the customer system, and no longer retains the last step of the financial manual withdrawal card.
7. Suppliers, distributors, and logistics companies receive payment for goods
This is the last step in this process, and the bank pays the funds to the corresponding payee. If the payee does not enable a mobile phone notification or the like, it may not know that the money has been received in time. Therefore, after our business system receives the settlement process, it will notify the bound contact again and the funds have arrived.
05 Summary
merchant settlement through direct bank-enterprise connection can effectively simplify the platform's manpower and material resources, ensure the accuracy of fund calculation through system processes, reduce unnecessary personnel intervention and shorten the settlement cycle, and even fully automated withdrawals can be achieved in the future.
For some small suppliers, capital flow is fast, and too long accounting period will be very unfavorable for their survival. For the platform, speeding up settlement can effectively improve suppliers' shipment and after-sales enthusiasm.
This article was originally published by @iCheer on Everyone is a product manager. Reproduction is prohibited without the author's permission. The
question picture is from Unsplash and is based on the CC0 protocol.
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