Virtual Spotter provides specialist virtual assistant services to fitness and wellness clients, so they can get back to business instead of drowning in admin.
“I was running my own fitness franchise and living the pain of all the ‘9-to-11PM’ admin — answering emails, managing bookings and class schedules, amending payments — so I trained my own virtual assistant to help,” said Zac Joyce, Co-founder, Virtual Spotter. “Virtual Spotter was born when I realised everyone else in the franchise was struggling with the same issues. We basically take care of all of that for customers.”
Virtual Spotter uses GoCardless to collect clients’ monthly payments for its services, meaning it gets a similar slice of admin-busting support when it comes to getting paid.
“GoCardless is our own virtual payment assistant,” said Zac.
Automated payments from GoCardless mean we’ve never needed to hire a dedicated accounts receivables person, and I’ve never had to chase anyone for a payment. Payments admin barely exists for us now.
Used it, loved it
Zac had already used GoCardless when running the franchised fitness business, so there was only one place he was headed when he was looking for a payments solution of his own.
“We’d used it and we loved it, and we knew we could just switch it on and payments would be sorted,” said Zac. “I still remember how cool it felt the first time the money just automatically hit our bank account. Five years later, GoCardless handles 95% of our payments volume, which is around 600 transactions a month.”
Virtual Spotter’s payments automation runs end-to-end, from invoicing to collection to reconciliation, because GoCardless is integrated with Xero. Its payments are truly set-and-forget.
“We also love the native integration with Xero, and that’s something we just switched on ourselves too,” said Zac. “Once customers are onboarded and work starts, we just have to trigger an invoice in Xero to start the monthly collection process and payments are then automatically matched to invoices. We only have one part-time employee handling all our finance stuff, not just payments.”
International payments without the hassle (and less of the fees)
We can collect in multiple currencies with GoCardless, and it handles the FX conversion to AUD during reconciliations. The fees are lower than the banks’ and, instead of 11 different bank accounts and 11 different sets of reconciliations, we have one account and one set of reconciliations, all unified in the GoCardless dashboard and synced with Xero.
This has allowed Virtual Spotter to take international growth in its stride.
“The US is now our biggest market and collecting payments there with GoCardless allows us to keep pushing that growth further,” said Zac. “It’s never missed a beat with payments anywhere in the world.”
No mistakes. Ever
It’s important to Zac to stay as close as possible to customers, and he says error-free payments are a big part of making that possible.
“Over five years, with 6,000-plus transactions a year, we've never had the incorrect amount collected from a customer,” said Zac. “That builds a lot of trust, and because GoCardless works like an unseen infrastructure in the background, it doesn’t add an extra layer between us and customers.”
Sick of chasing payments? Get GoCardless
Zac wrapped things up with some words of advice for any business owner who’s sick of chasing customers for payments.
“If you depend on recurring payments and have ever had trouble collecting from customers, then GoCardless are your guys,” he said.
It’s allowed us to pretty much forget about payments admin, and we feel confident we won’t need to worry about scaling up our payments infrastructure as we keep growing.
