Crunch
“It’s become clear that GoCardless, alongside Asperato, has taken everything good about Direct Debit and added in all the modern features that make it supremely reliable and easy to manage.”
Stephen Paynter, Finance Director, Crunch
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Small business accounting platform
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Find out more about Crunch
Crunch is a small business accounting platform founded in 2009, with over 48,000 members and approximately 10,000 paying customers benefiting from its software and accounting advice. Founded in 2013, the company now employees almost 200 people, helping businesses across the UK.
According to Finance Director Stephen Paynter, “Crunch is all about helping small businesses thrive, and helping them shoulder the burden of accounting.” Businesses working with Crunch range from sole traders to small businesses with around 20 employees.
An opportunity to transform Direct Debit collection
Crunch already uses Direct Debit for all of its regular subscription payments. But a decision to transform its use of Financial Force and move to the newest version of Salesforce presented an opportunity to streamline its Direct Debit collection process.
Asperato, a Salesforce ISV (independent software vendor) partner and ReadyApp Partner of FinancialForce, recommended GoCardless as the best Direct Debit solution for Crunch’s digital transformation project.
“Asperato has been working closely with both Salesforce and FinancialForce for several years. During an account review with the team at Crunch, we shared the vision of payment collection being a fully automated process and controlled by FinancialForce. The reality of automated Direct Debit processing via our integration with GoCardless was a vital part of the digital transformation for Crunch," explained Matt Tully, Global Strategic Partnerships Manager at Asperato.
While the overall project was wide-ranging and spanned a number of months, the actual integration of the Asperato Application (with the GoCardless integration) only took a few days to deploy. Asperato’s ReadyApp status with FinancialForce was one of the key reasons the deploy time was so quick.
Less admin time and better visibility
Stephen noticed an immediate improvement in the payment information Crunch received using GoCardless. One long-term objective for the finance team was to be able to set up a Direct debit mandate completely online, with no human intervention needed. With GoCardless and Asperato, this goal finally became a reality.
We’re now able to simply send a payment link for Direct Debit. This has helped reduce risk and increase productivity.
The five-strong finance team at Crunch recently became four, and Stephen found they have been able to continue to process payments using GoCardless without replacing the missing member. This has effectively saved them 20% of the time previously required to collect, chase and reconcile all Direct Debit payments.
The problem before was that we didn’t get timely or useful information about failed payments or mandate cancellation. Now we have a dashboard that shows us all this information, and it has streamlined the entire collection process.
Reliable payment collection, even during COVID-19
Crunch has long had good payment success rates, and the finance team tracks the metric very closely. At Stephen’s estimate, payment failure rates were averaging at 2.2% before GoCardless. But since the integration, failure rates slowly decreased to just 1.9% by June 2020.
And this all came at a time when businesses across the country were facing great uncertainty in the wake of COVID-19. "We didn’t really know what to expect from our payment collections during COVID-19, but it’s been nice to see payment failure rates actually decrease slightly since we made the switch to GoCardless," Stephen explains.
Working with GoCardless and Asperato to get even more from payment collections for FinancialForce
With a new Direct Debit collection process that has removed a lot of the burden of manual admin, Finance Director Stephen is now looking to embed GoCardless and Asperato further into the business to increase payment success rates even more. Crunch is actively exploring Success+, which uses payment intelligence to retry failed payments on the optimal day for each customer.
GoCardless is different, to put it simply. I thought our old way of taking Direct Debit was OK,but it’s become clear that GoCardless, alongside Asperato, has taken everything good about Direct Debit and added in all the modern features that make it supremely reliable and easy to manage.
This customer story was written in partnership with our friends at Asperato. Asperato, a Salesforce ISV and FinancialForce ReadyApp partner, is a platform leader in global payment collection, leveraging the powerful processing capabilities of the world’s leading payment service providers.