Bakerford

Cheaper payments, lower admin

Bakerford is a managed service IT provider helping chiropractic doctors run more efficient and compliant clinics. It has customers across 43 states, including Alaska and Hawaii.

David Freeland is the owner – but he prefers the title Ambassador of Customer Success.

“I want to be a cheerleader for our customers,” he said. “Lots of companies preach customer centricity, but we have the agility of a small company with a niche offering so we get to really live it, even if it means lower margins for us sometimes.”

One way David maximizes his time spent focused on clients while preserving margins is by swapping manual and costly card payments for automated ACH Pull from GoCardless.

Savings go straight to the bottom line 

Bakerford made the change when it moved to the Xero accounting package, which has a ready-made integration with GoCardless.

“Our previous provider’s checking account integration was a huge hassle for clients to set up and almost never worked,” said David. “That meant nearly every customer paid by credit card, saddling us with huge fees. We wanted an alternative so much that we activated the integration with GoCardless even before our Xero account was fully set up.”

Since then, the speed and scale of customer adoption has taken David by surprise. And the savings have quickly started to add up.

“With GoCardless it costs just $4 to collect customers’ initial $1,500 payments for larger projects, compared to $42 with cards, and monthly subscriptions cost ¢60 compared to $3. Those savings go straight to our bottom line where they can pay for software or marketing. They’ve also allowed us to put off price increases, helping to keep us competitive.”

More time for family

David was impressed that the integration between Xero and GoCardless took just a few clicks to activate – time well spent when he considers the time he has since saved on admin.

“That’s more time to focus on selling and customers, but work isn’t the only thing on my desk. I have plenty of sticky notes from my wife; we have four kids and a crazy schedule. Anything I can do to automate manual business tasks means more time for family.”

Autopilot payments

GoCardless’ extremely low payment failure rate also saves further valuable time for David when it comes to chasing late-paying customers.

“It just runs on autopilot; GoCardless is very much a set and forget tool, which I couldn’t say about other payment methods,” said David.

“GoCardless has only ever failed twice, whereas we get five or six card failures a month because they expire, get lost or stolen. Not having to chase that portion of customers saves me another couple of hours.”

Future plans to promote GoCardless

David has a few ideas in the works to increase GoCardless adoption among customers to save more time and money for the business, himself and his family.

“Nobody's complained about it and the impact has been huge for us, so we plan to make a big push to GoCardless,” he said. “If we offered a 2% discount to switch we’d still come out ahead, and we’ve even considered removing the option to pay by credit card from our invoices.”

The range of benefits Bakerford has seen from GoCardless leaves David in little doubt that many other businesses could enjoy the same success.

“It’s just a better solution for everybody, from our own cost and time savings through to the fact customers don’t have to think about payments either,” he said. “Imagine how the savings I’ve described would scale as businesses get larger and more complex? That’s something we certainly hope to find out.”