Clearco

Crystal clear visibility means pain-free payments

Clearco provides working capital to e-commerce businesses in the United States, funding invoices and receipts to free up cash flow so it can be re-invested in growth. 

“We provide access to predictable, controllable and scalable funding for ecommerce businesses,” said Blake Connoy, VP of Operations, Clearco. “In ten years we’ve funded tens of thousands of businesses with billions of dollars in working capital.”

Clearco has a range of e-commerce brands across apparel, footwear, travel, food, and other popular sectors. The Clearco customer ranges from seasonal users to power users that fund invoices monthly, bimonthly, and even weekly. Customers use this funding for inventory, marketing spend, shipping and logistics bills, and more.

Every one of these customers pays Clearco with GoCardless, which has leveraged automated bank payments to allow Clearco to build an effective, reliable, and efficient payments operation.

Vexing complexity

But it wasn’t always this way. Before centralizing payments onto GoCardless, Clearco’s payment stack consisted of six payment processors (including GoCardless), which had organically evolved as the company grew to service different markets and transact in different currencies.

“This was a very noisy environment,” said Josh Friedman, Staff Product Manager, Clearco. “Complexity was through the roof for developers and product teams, and it was difficult to customize systems to create a consistent payments operation.”

Small issues had a habit of becoming big ones, too. Different systems generate different error codes. They also have variations in their user experiences, the way they organize data and payment timings. This added up to poor visibility and made it harder to receive payments than it should’ve been.

“Investigating customers’ payment statuses, making changes, or even just finding simple information, was a lot of work and it wasn’t always accurate,” said Lorrah Sengdeuanpheng, Payments Administrative Manager, Clearco. 

Between grinding manual admin and complex integrations, sometimes payment failures or chargebacks were difficult to surface and action efficiently. There were even situations where it turned out months later that customer payments of several thousand hadn’t actually cleared. “As a consequence, we needed more team resources than we should have since they needed to go on fishing expeditions across our systems to figure out what happened,” said Blake.

Global coverage and loved by developers – there was only one choice

Eventually, enough was enough. To simplify operations, streamline getting paid and increase visibility, Clearco moved from six payment processors to just one: GoCardless.

“GoCardless covers all the geographies and currencies we need now and will need in the future,” said Josh. “It’s also heavily favored by our developers for its ease of use and integration – it’s always been hailed as clean and straightforward to work with.”

Those developers haven’t wasted a minute, taking advantage of the consolidation and the GoCardless API to tighten up Clearco’s integrations between payment operations and the rest of its systems.

“GoCardless has given us incredible reliability. It's been a year and a half of having a trusted payment process thanks to the tight integration,” added Blake.

Up to 20 hours of admin saved, every week 

Lorrah and her team are also feeling a lot more relaxed about payments.

“We know for sure that all the information on GoCardless is reflected in our systems, and that it’s accurate,” she said. “It now takes two minutes instead of ten to check payment statuses or make changes, because we can find any customer in GoCardless through custom search parameters.”

From fewer systems and errors to greater visibility and increased automation, the time saved in admin has quickly added up. “We're saving between 10 and 20 hours in payment processing every week thanks to GoCardless and the reduction in both investigations and manual processing.”

Cashflow has become even more predictable since enabling Faster ACH - the latest enhancement for GoCardless ACH. Payments are created, charged, and then settled 2 days quicker. 

Payments so reliable they’re almost boring

These efficiencies and cost savings have left Clearco free to focus on growth without worrying whether its payment systems can keep up.

“Our customer base continues to grow and GoCardless means we don’t have to factor managing payments into those plans – they’re taken care of and working effectively,” said Blake.

“In fact, payments are almost boring at this point, but in a good way. GoCardless is super reliable; it just works, so we can put our energy into building a better – and bigger – business.”