For the love of payments

PayFit’s “love affair” with GoCardless means it gets paid throughout Europe, quickly and easily, while saving its customers the hassle of scheduling payments.

Paris-based PayFit helps employers digitise their payroll processes and a range of HR functions. For a monthly subscription, its SME customers can automate their payroll and other repetitive HR tasks, such as editing payslips, recording absences and holidays, filing expense reports, and monitoring overtime.

It has grown from a few hundred customers to more than 6,000 in only a few years and GoCardless has been there every step of the way.

“PayFit and GoCardless have been a love affair since 2016,” said Hugo Costa, Cash Collections Manager at PayFit. “We set out to revolutionise the HR market by digitising everything, and we knew we’d need the best tools – and partnerships – to help us handle a large volume of billing.”

Push button payments

By integrating GoCardless with its Zuora billing software, PayFit has automated the entire process of getting paid – from invoicing to collection – for almost every one of its thousands of customers.

This means the company saves a lot of time, even more money, and benefits from better cash flow.

“With 99% of customers paying with GoCardless we’ve saved approximately one FTE worth €2000-3000 per month,” said Anne Sturtzer, Finance Operations Manager at PayFit. “Once we’ve generated our invoices in Zuora, we can automatically batch-generate all direct bank payments on GoCardless, and reconcile them as they come in. In other words, we can invoice and get paid at the touch of a button, compared to bank transfers which can take weeks, or even months.”

Streamlined and repeatable

PayFit’s ability to offer a simple payments experience at scale is vital if it’s to keep its promise of making customers’ lives easier, explained Anne Sturtzer, PayFit’s Finance Ops Manager.

“Since we launched everything has been going pretty fast and now we have thousands of customers paying relatively small amounts each month,” she said. “GoCardless allows us to automate our payment processes, saving us time and sparing customers the hassle of paying us manually or managing card payments. Sales just sends them a link to set up their direct bank pay mandate and then there’s no further action needed.”

As PayFit has moved beyond its home market and into Great Britain, Germany, and Spain, it has also taken its payments systems and processes with it.

GoCardless’ international presence was a huge factor for us, and it is still our primary payment solution in each of our markets. Our teams know how it works so it really simplifies the opening up of new countries.

Ahead of the game

The partnership with GoCardless allows PayFit to turn payments innovation into fuel for growth, according to Hugo.

“We try to be on the cutting edge and GoCardless helps us get ahead of the game by proactively flagging payments insights and opportunities,” said Hugo. “The quarterly meetings with our Customer Success Manager are regularly filled with interesting stats on our payments operations, such as success and failure rates. This drives us to always challenge ourselves to be better.”

Success might have come quickly for PayFit, but Hugo believes the journey has only just started and there is plenty more that PayFit and GoCardless can achieve together.

GoCardless has supported our growth for years and we have every confidence that they will continue to do so, again and again,” he said. “They’ve been with us from 100 clients to 6,000. Why not from 6,000 to 12,000 – or even 100,000?