Bambu is an online advertising agency for small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses that are looking to scale and grow their businesses to reach £1million in annual revenue. Bambu uses GoCardless to collect clients’ invoice payments and give customers a frictionless onboarding experience.
Bambu Founder and Head of Strategy, Oliver Springate, noted, “I think coming into running my own business, there was a degree of naivety about how easy it is to get paid.“ He continues, “You'd assume you send an invoice, and somebody's going to send you money the next day or the next week. And in a lot of cases, that just wasn't happening."
GoCardless is the difference between getting paid and not getting paid.” Oliver Springate, Founder and Head of Strategy, Bambu.
Oliver quickly realised that automating how Bambu gets paid was essential to running the business smoothly, and spending time chasing payments wasn’t the best use of his time. “I'm sure a lot of other small businesses out there will understand that pain of chasing an invoice that you've forgotten about. You're simply not hearing anything back from the person that owes you money.” He adds, “Where GoCardless has really made a difference for us is not losing payments that we're owed.”
Ending late payments means more time for clients
Bambu uses GoCardless as its primary payment option to give its team time to focus on what really matters: doing great work for its clients. “95% of our UK billing is done through GoCardless, and having so much of it go through one system is just a massive help in terms of simplifying everything,” says Oliver. “In terms of not losing payments and the amount that we've been able to reduce our workload on bookkeeping and accounting, GoCardless easily pays for itself.”
Josh Gibbon, Bambu’s Head of Partnerships, says, “GoCardless just makes the whole process of monthly ongoing payments a lot easier and a lot smoother - and a lot more consistent.” He adds, "GoCardless allows Bambu to be focused on partnerships and sales. It allows us to onboard new partners and new clients a lot quicker than if we were stuck with a manual finance system."
GoCardless frees up more money to be spent on other areas of the business. In a marketing consultancy like ours, our big expense is staff. It's helped with recruiting staff. It's helped with pay rises. It's helped with bringing on freelancers that are really crucial to what we deliver as a business.” Oliver Springate, Founder and Head of Strategy, Bambu.
Oliver comments on the impact of reliable payments in his role as a founder, “The reduction of stress on myself as the business owner of not constantly having to worry about getting paid,” says Oliver, “And I sleep better at night. It means that I can focus more on what I'm doing day to day and help our clients with their marketing, rather than constantly having these awkward conversations asking them when they're going to pay their invoice.”
Bambu can focus on creating value for clients
From the moment clients sign a contract with Bambu, GoCardless facilitates a seamless experience. “We use Better Proposals for all of our contracts. So as soon as someone signs a contract with us, they go through to the GoCardless form. From there, they can just fill out the finance, all the information, and it's done. There's no need for us to ask them for any more information or waste more time. We just get straight into building up strategies and building out campaigns for people,” says Josh.
And Bambu can spend time with clients on what really matters. “Some of our clients have even mentioned that with other marketing agencies, a lot of their monthly calls are just spent discussing payments,” says Oliver. “I think the fact that we can just focus on what we're actually delivering as a service and not have to derail conversations to talk about finances is something that our clients seem to really appreciate.”
Invoices are paid quickly with GoCardless and Xero
“Having GoCardless integrate with Xero just makes our life so much easier on the bookkeeping side,” says Oliver. “Another big time saver for us is the fact that when that invoice is paid, it sends that data back to Xero - our bookkeeping system - so it marks it as paid in that system.”
Josh comments on the visibility that the integration brings to the business, “GoCardless and Xero are massively helpful in terms of tracking our finances, tracking what's coming through and what's going out, and accounting for invoices.”
