“Before we signed up, we were waiting up to 60 days for clients to pay us. That's now been brought down to 20 days.” Ali Shariat, Co-Founder, ThisWayUp.
About
Consultancy helping retailers grow on online marketplaces
ThisWayUp helps brands and retailers launch and grow on online marketplaces. Co-founders Ali Shariat and Zamir Cajee started ThisWayUp by running similar projects for their own brands and leveraged this expertise to help other businesses do the same. Capitalising on the demand for online retail during COVID, Ali and Zamir grew ThisWayUp to support small businesses and household names like illy, Hip Pop and Ordo.
ThisWayUp uses GoCardless as its default payment option for clients to pay their invoices and power their international payments. “Currently, 80%-90% of our clients sign up with GoCardless,” says Ali. He adds, “One good thing that GoCardless does is it supports international payments from different currencies coming through to our account, keeping it really simple and streamlined.”
"We use One-off Direct Debit for the majority of our clients,” says Zamir. “We have long-term relationships that we build with them, and the One-off Direct Debit means that every invoice each month gets paid on time at a predictable point for both us and our customers."
Zamir adds, “Knowing that we have dependable and predictable cash flow releases both that time element and also that headspace element.” Ali mentions that before GoCardless, “It was a real headache because you have to chase people all the time, and it was just a manual process.”
Success+ means that we can do these automated retries, and it’ll keep going back and looking for when funds are available,” adds Zamir.
Instalments bring another flexibility to the business. Zamir says, “We work with our clients in different ways. A lot of them will have long-term relationships, but sometimes we do short-term projects. And where we have those, we're able to split the payment terms across multiple instalments. GoCardless just handles that for us.”
“I think the best thing about GoCardless is just its simplicity. From a management perspective, it's not difficult. It's very intuitive, really straightforward to set up, and then it just runs,” says Zamir.
Seamless bookkeeping facilitated by Xero
Ali explains how managing payments has been simplified by the integration with their accounting software, Xero. “GoCardless integrates directly into Xero. And what that does is as soon as an invoice is issued, it feeds into GoCardless. And the payment terms that we've initiated there are triggered.”
“It was so straightforward. It was so simple to set up the account with GoCardless,” says Zamir. “When we integrated GoCardless with Xero, it was incredibly seamless. I was a little bit frustrated that I hadn't done it sooner because it was so straightforward.”
The combination of automated payments and integrated bookkeeping saves ThisWayUp’s founders valuable time and headspace to focus on their clients and their business.
Zamir looks back on how his time was spent before and after using GoCardless, “The time reduction in payment terms is really important, but actually it's the time it saves me and the team. As a founder, I don't think we really consider how much time it absorbs. Because there's a time you spend chasing payments, but then it's all the extra time you spend looking at reports, and thinking about it and discussing it. When you build all of that time in, we're probably talking about more than 20 hours a month of my time that was spent dealing with late payments in some way.”
Cash flow is key
“For any small business, cash flow is really key. For us, GoCardless gives us the opportunity to manage and predict payments,” says Zamir.
“One big unlock that GoCardless brought us was literally this idea of cash flow management,” says Ali. Thanks to the automation of payments with GoCardless, ThisWayUp’s founders and their finance team have full visibility of when they’ll be paid. Ali added, “Our accountant also knows that on a certain date, X amount of money is going to come in via GoCardless, and we know it's just taken care of. So if there are invoices that need to be paid in advance or after, we can manage that cash flow a lot easier.”
The automation of their payments has enabled the business to reduce the time it takes customers to pay invoices. Ali explains, “Before we signed up, we were waiting for up to 60 days for clients to pay us. That's now been brought down to 20 days.”
After discovering the Capital powered by Pipe feature in their GoCardless dashboard, ThisWayUp leveraged a cash advance to facilitate the growth of their business. “It allows us to accelerate our growth rapidly without being held back for another six months to a year because we just don't have the current cash, and that allows us to kind of boost that through immediately,” says Ali.
ThisWayUp was able to access capital quickly to keep up with the growth of its business. “The fact that Capital powered by Pipe is able to move at the same pace as a founder is just fantastic. It allows us to try things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do,” says Zamir. “In terms of the entire process for securing the capital, we started on one day, and we had the cash in the account by the end of the next day. It was incredibly painless and really straightforward.”
