Echecks were once thought to be a kind of science-fiction. Thanks to the advent of wireless electronic check acceptance, thousands of businesses across the nation currently employ echecks on a regular basis. So will small businesses soon be able to accept echecks as well, or will this phenomenon remain the domain of the big banks and the big businesses for some time?

There are two reasons why I think that echeck acceptance will proliferate dramatically in the coming years. First of all, small businesses often deal with customers who dont have credit cards. As a result, they must either take cash or they must except handwritten checks. While many small companies have grown accustomed to handling accounting based on this paradigm, its ultimately a less than ideal way to do business

When Will Small Businesses Accept Echecks?
Second of all, as more and more customers and business people alike go online to complete transactions, it becomes increasingly hard to sustain this handwritten check paradigm. Some old-fashioned business people like to chalk this up to pure impatience. Yet in an economy that operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, time is of the essence for small businesses and customers alike.

Given these two factors–the inconvenience of the old system and the pressures of the Internet economy–I think its inevitable that many businesses will soon adopt electronic checking. In addition, once enough businesses get into the game, we will likely see a tipping point, in which a rash of ACH checking accounts open. The good news is that if you open an account sooner rather than later, your chance at a great rate will go up.