Thousands more payments, same five-person finance team

Crunch brings together easy-to-use online accounting software with a real accountant built in, to help freelancers, contractors, small businesses and sole traders take control of their finances. And all for a fair price.

“The aim of our business is to empower the sole trader and the small micro limited businesses, so they can feel in control of their finances,” said Stephen Payner, Finance Director, Crunch.

Crunch collects monthly and annual subscriptions from its customers, and its finance operations are geared around optimising cashflow to fund investment and growth.

We use our free cash to invest in our own software, so cash flow is king,” said Stephen. “Having a system that delivers our Direct Debits on time is how we grow — and we depend on Unaric with GoCardless for Salesforce to handle every transaction we make every month.

Payment day used to mean holding their breath

Before GoCardless, the team used Salesforce to generate payment files and uploaded them manually to the bank’s Direct Debit system.

“It was slow and cumbersome,” said Stephen. “We always wondered ‘has our BACS file actually gone through?’ And there was major friction with getting customers to sign and return Direct Debit mandates, which slowed down the onboarding process.”

So when Crunch began upgrading its Salesforce CRM with Unaric, it also took the opportunity to transform its payments using the built-in GoCardless integration.

Slick collections, minimal failures, no extra hires

GoCardless is now handling thousands of recurring payments every month for Crunch and its payment operations run like clockwork.

“Our payment operations today are slick,” said Stephen. “In GoCardless and Unaric we have two top players ensuring we collect payments faster and keep failures to a minimum. And because it’s an out-of-the-box integration, we were able to keep our developers and contractors focused on the CRM upgrade and other high-value work.”

As Crunch has scaled, it has kept up with payment volumes using just a handful of people in its finance team.

“We rarely have to get involved in payments now,” said Stephen.

The automation lets us run a finance team of just five people handling 6,500 paying clients — and if we had 3,000 more, we still wouldn’t have to grow the team. With the visibility and automation we get from GoCardless, it’s almost like having an extra person in the department monitoring every payment coming in.

The power of the partnership

Best-in-class payment operations like Crunch’s are exactly why Unaric partnered with GoCardless to add its bank payments capabilities to its Salesforce solutions.

“GoCardless is a really important partner for us because of their strength in the bank-to-bank space,” said Nick Chaffe, Founder, Unaric Payments. “With other potential payment partners we hit real challenges — they were taking legacy, old-style payments and dropping them into a very forward-thinking digital environment, which just doesn’t work. With GoCardless we’re able to help customers navigate the complex world of payments and drive more value for their own customers.”

Nick has seen first-hand how this approach puts customers on the fast track to innovation.

As Crunch experienced, the GoCardless relationship lets customers concentrate on their business without worrying about the technicalities of payments inside Salesforce. They don’t have to keep reinvesting and reworking the integration — we’ve essentially given them that innovation ready-made.

A three-way partnership built for growth

For Nick, it now feels like there are three parties in the partnership, not two.

“I’m really proud that we’ve been able to meet Crunch’s requirements and their changing needs as a business,” he said. “We’ve helped them change payment providers to GoCardless, we’ve helped them improve their systems, and we’ve built a great relationship with the team there.”

“GoCardless is really important to Crunch. It’s about us collecting promptly, and about letting our clients know their payments go through the system,” added Stephen. “GoCardless and Unaric are the right partners to ensure our business grows — together we’re a stronger force.”