Mörk Chocolate

Carefree payments

Mörk Chocolate supplies around 700 customers in Australia, the UK and Japan with dark drinking chocolate for the specialty coffee industry. 

“The word Mörk actually means dark in Swedish,” said Kiril Shaginov, one of its co-founders. “We make all of our chocolate bean-to-bar, and customers are really attracted to the quality. That’s what we want to focus on.”

To ensure collecting payments doesn’t distract its chocolate makers and hospitality professionals from delivering great chocolate and great service, Mörk gets paid with GoCardless. 

“We partnered with GoCardless right from the beginning, so our people can stick to customer care and cut out any uncomfortable conversations about collecting money,” said Kiril. “GoCardless has almost eliminated any account chasing or debt collection.”

Saving tens of thousands of dollars 

Letting GoCardless take care of payments also means Mörk can run a lean team. This simultaneously allows it to grow fast without increasing fixed costs, while also improving cash flow.

“Without GoCardless we would need an accountant or a debts collection person, so that’s a massive direct saving of about $90,000 a year,” said Kiril.

Direct bank payments are also the payment method that works best for Mörk Chocolate’s customers. “We work with smaller cafes so Direct Debit makes the most sense for both those business owners and us as a supplier,” said Kiril.

A thing of beauty

Mörk is also a long-time user of Xero accounting software, which it has integrated with GoCardless to make reconciliations one less diversion from making chocolate.

“Xero are right when they call themselves beautiful accounting software and it's changed our business massively,” said Kiril. “GoCardless and Xero are seamless together and what we love most is the reconciliations. After the payments have been collected, we just click 'okay', everything gets bucketed away and it's all good. That aspect really does speed up our accounting processes.”

Payments as smooth as chocolate

The GoCardless platform has made the Mörk customer experience as smooth as its chocolate. Kiril puts that down to the strength of the tech and the way it’s freed both the team and customers from worrying about financial admin.

“Payments are just not on our mind, because GoCardless is always seamlessly running in the background,” said Kiril. “Customers are really looking for error-free technology when it comes to automated payments. Ours really enjoy the fact that the money just comes out and they can see it’s accurate every single time.”

Failed payments are also of little concern to the team, unlike with credit cards. “We’re definitely seeing a lot less payment failures with GoCardless versus credit cards, which can expire or hit the top of their limit.”

All the right answers

Working closely with GoCardless has allowed Kiril to take a more relaxed attitude to getting paid, and any minor issues are solved quickly.

“The team here on the ground in Melbourne are incredible and having GoCardless in our corner really gives us peace of mind,” said Kiril. “Anytime we have issues, we've always had all the right answers and the GoCardless team has been extremely accommodating. Thanks to them we spend most of our time working on what we do best: making chocolate.”