More than half of US small businesses are owed money on invoices they have already sent, and the 2025 Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Late Payments Report puts the average amount outstanding at roughly $17,500 per business. About 47% of them have invoices more than 30 days past due. The work was finished, the invoice went out, and the balance is waiting on a check that someone has to write and mail.
The Check Problem in Small Business Receivables
Checks accounted for 26% of business-to-business payments in 2025, down from 33% in 2022, according to survey work by the Association for Financial Professionals. That decline has been gradual. The same research found that 91% of organizations still use checks and more than 75% have no plan to stop. Small businesses report the same pattern from the other side of the counter. Visa’s 2025 US Small Business Payment Behavior Study found that small business decision makers expect their check use to fall further this year than any other method, with the volume moving to cards and to ACH and wire transfer.
The cost of the remaining check volume is measured in days. Xero’s United States Small Business Insights put the average wait on a small business invoice at 28.8 days in 2026. For a business with a thin buffer, that number matters more than the total owed. Roughly 25% of small businesses operate with 13 or fewer days of cash on hand, which turns one slow customer into a payroll question. Checks are also the method most exposed to fraud. The 2025 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey found 63% of organizations faced attempted or actual check fraud during 2024.
Phone and Mail Order Sales
A countertop card reader assumes the customer is standing in front of it. Plenty of small businesses rarely meet their customers at all. An HVAC contractor closes out the job and calls the office with the total. Wholesale suppliers ship on net 30 and chase the money by phone weeks later. In a law office the bill goes out once the matter closes, while an equipment repair shop quoting over the phone usually wants a deposit before it orders the part.
Every one of those sales is card-not-present, the same category the card networks apply to mail and telephone orders. The customer reads the number aloud, or writes it on a form, and someone on the business side keys it in. The transaction itself is ordinary. What is missing is the equipment, because there is no card to swipe or tap.
The gap shows up most often in businesses that sell to other businesses, where the collection step happens weeks after the work is finished. Owners dealing with slow-paying customers often hesitate to push hard for the money, because the same account is the one they want to sell to again next quarter. By the time the office does follow up, the fastest resolution is a phone call that ends with a card number instead of another promise to mail something.
How to Set Up Remote Card Acceptance
Keyed entry needs somewhere to go. A virtual credit card terminal runs in a browser, so the laptop that produced the invoice can also take the payment, and no separate hardware has to be bought or mounted. Staff open a page, enter the card number, expiration date, security code, and billing ZIP, and submit the charge while the customer is still on the line.
Repeat customers make the setup more useful. Card details can be stored against a customer record so a second or third order does not require reading the number aloud again. Receipts go out by email. Refunds and voids are handled on the same screen as the original sale, which keeps the reconciliation work in one place instead of splitting it between a reader, an online store, and a stack of paper.
Compliance and Fraud Exposure on Keyed Sales
Taking a card over the phone puts a business inside the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Version 4.0 reached full effect on April 1, 2025, and version 4.0.1 has been the live standard since March 31, 2025. Most small merchants that outsource every cardholder data function to a provider validate under SAQ A, the shortest of the self-assessment questionnaires.
Scope reaches further than the payment page. Any system component that can affect the security of cardholder data is inside the assessment, and version 4.0.1 confirmed that a call recording system capturing DTMF tones counts even when the digits are never stored as text. In practice, the largest exposure in a small office is the notepad. A card number written down during a call, left on a desk, and thrown out at the end of the day is a handling failure that no software setting repairs. Entering the number straight into a hosted page and never writing it anywhere keeps the business inside the boundary the standard draws.
Card-not-present transactions made up 73% of US credit card payment fraud in 2024, up from 57% in 2019. The merchant never sees the card and has no chip read behind the sale, so the issuer has fewer signals to work with before approving it. The available controls are modest and they hold up well at small volumes. Address verification checks the billing street number and ZIP against the file the issuer holds. The security code on the back confirms the caller has the plastic in hand. Limits on large first-time orders, plus a manual look at anything unusual, catch a good share of the rest.
A business that keys in cards should also expect the pricing to account for that risk. Keyed sales are treated as higher risk than a chip read, which shows up in the rate. For a company replacing 30-day checks with same-day settlement, the arithmetic usually still favors the card, because a few basis points on a collected invoice beats a month of waiting on one that has not arrived. The paper moving the other way keeps thinning out anyway. Americans wrote 11.2 billion checks in 2021, down from 18.1 billion in 2015, and paper checks are now refused outright by several national retailers.
Setting Up the First Remote Payment
Pull the accounts receivable list and find the oldest invoice past 30 days. Call the customer, ask if they would rather settle it on a card than write a check, and take the number on that call. Most will agree, because paying a bill in 2 minutes on the phone is easier than finding a checkbook and a stamp. One collected invoice is a small result on its own. It is also the quickest way to find out if keyed acceptance belongs in the business, and it costs an afternoon to run.
