Hammerjack

Hammerjack is an outsourced services provider, which works closely with its clients across many different industries to help them create offshore delivery teams.

Based in Manila, Philippines – the Hammerjack team has grown from 12 to over 160 in the last two and a half years, with a smaller, specialised team providing on the ground support to clients in Australia.

We spoke to Director of Business Development and Partnerships, Nick Hastings, to find out how Hammerjack is using GoCardless for Xero to help scale the business and reduce the time spent settling accounts receivable balances.

Variable monthly payments

Before moving to GoCardless, Hammerjack accepted bank-to-bank Direct Debit payments from a different provider. While this helped facilitate fixed recurring billings, Nick found that variable monthly payments still left the team with a heavy admin burden.

“There just wasn’t any flexibility. For any customer that had a variable monthly charge, we were still reliant on legacy payment methods like EFT, which is a lot more manual,” said Nick.

As Hammerjack continued to grow, Nick spoke to business consultant, Tim Hoopmann, who recommended GoCardless as a more flexible way to take Direct Debit payments.

“Tim is a GoCardless partner, which meant we could trial GoCardless easily. He put us in touch with the GoCardless team and from there we were up and running in a couple of weeks,” Nick explains.

A centralised system

In a period of rapid growth, Nick was looking to streamline processes to help the business run and scale more efficiently. He says:

“The GoCardless for Xero integration is a big plus. It was simple to set up and means we can collect payments on specific invoices directly from Xero – with the reconciliation process being automated also.”

This has meant that Hammerjack now has a much more predictable view of cash flow, and the team doesn’t have to spend so much time on payments admin.

“Knowing payments will come in on time and with automatic reconciliation, our finance team saves at least a day a month in admin time and, on average, our credit terms have gone from 14 days down to less than a week across our client base,” Nick explains. “This is great as it frees the team up to focus on value-add work, rather than manual data entry.”

Future proofing processes

Nick has found that one main benefits of using GoCardless is that now all payments can run easily through one centralised system – where before there were lots of separate channels running at the same time. Nick says:

“The flexibility we get from GoCardless for Xero means we can give all of our clients one preferred payment method and the same payment terms.  It allows us to offer Direct Debit to 90% of our clients, rather than only the 40% we could serve before.”

Better for businesses

Many of Hammerjack’s clients are accountants and bookkeepers in Australia. Nick says:

“With Direct Debit and GoCardless, payments just come in on time. It takes a level of friction out of the payment process, which allows time to be spent helping customers save, grow and transform through Hammerjack services and build deeper relationships along the way.”