Counting the savings of digital payments

KER is a chartered accountants firm based in Nantes that specialises in providing business advisory services for real estate companies, medical practices, and startups.

Almost all of KER’s clients — 95% — pay by Direct Debit, which was a laborious process until it switched to GoCardless integrated with Pennylane accounting software.

“We used to use the bank’s systems, which involved paper SEPA mandates and manually exporting and uploading XML files,” said Yvonnick Rouat, Founder, KER. “We needed to get that time back, somehow, and since automating everything with GoCardless and Pennylane payments are much easier.”

Four days of admin saved

Invoicing was a monthly drag when the team had to export an XML payments file from Pennylane and then upload that to the bank.

“Collecting all that data together was time-consuming,” said Yvonnick. “And then when the payments came back we had to manually reconcile them in our accounts. Everything took a lot of time and there was always the risk of errors.”

Getting paid is now error-free and a whole lot quicker for KER because of the direct API connection between GoCardless and Pennylane.

Raising an invoice in Pennylane automatically schedules the collection in GoCardless. Once the money is collected, GoCardless sends the data back to Pennylane for automatic reconciliation. This saves at least four days a month of payments admin, which gives us more time to support and advise our customers.

Speaking of customers, KER’s love GoCardless too.

“They get automated alerts when their payments are falling due, and this extra layer of transparency and professionalism just isn’t possible with traditional bank interfaces,” said Yvonnick.”

Simple implementation

Because of the API-led integration between GoCardless and Pennylane it took just days for KER to get up and running with automated payments.

“There’s nothing technical to it, because GoCardless and Pennylane have already taken care of all that,” he said. “From subscribing to GoCardless through to testing the first Direct Debits took just ten to twelve days, and within a month it was fully implemented across all clients.”

Local touch

Payments are the lifeblood of a business, so when making a change it helps to partner with a specialist that has local support teams in place. For Yvonnick, this was a major deciding factor in favour of GoCardless.

We looked at other payment providers and online banks, but GoCardless is a specialist in Direct Debit. It’s also got a team based here in France, so we can get local support. We’ve hardly had to ask for any, but if we do we always get a resolution within 24-48 hours.

Get set, scale

Yvonnick is planning to expand KER’s operations to other French cities in the near future. As the company grows, he expects automated payments to save even more time.

“With GoCardless we have almost nothing to do on payments now, even with hundreds of payments a month, so we know we can scale without generating any extra admin,” he said.

Anyone hesitating to switch to Direct Debit should just do it. Our decision to work with GoCardless has made getting paid much easier, and there’s no doubt it has helped us to grow bigger, faster.