Days Sales Outstanding, compared to 15 days previously.
80%
of customers pay via GoCardless.
Payments you can trust
Trustup is an end-to-end business management platform for trade professionals in the construction and renovation sector. Its tools and services include quoting and invoicing, personnel management, profitability insights and website creation. An online marketplace also connects customers with end consumers who need their skills.
“We’re a one-stop shop helping tradespeople manage their business and find new projects,” said Gilles Hardy, CFO, Trustup. “The last thing customers need is more admin, so if we want to be paid on time then we need to make it as easy as possible for them to pay us.”
Trustup lets customers choose to pay their invoices by either manual bank transfer or by GoCardless. But busy customers plus manual bank transfers has turned out to be a reliable recipe for late payments, explained Gilles.
“Collecting manual payments has always been messy,” he said.
There’s a one-to-one relationship between late payments and manual payers, but it’s not because they don’t want to pay – it’s because they’re so busy.
Before GoCardless, Trustup was using an alternative SEPA payments solution. But when payment success rates started trending downwards it knew it needed to make a change.
“Payment success rate was getting worse and cash management was suffering, and yet the previous provider couldn’t provide any data to help us understand what was happening,” said Gilles. “To make matters worse, they charged us almost nine euros per failed payment. This added up to a lot over a year, and customers were unhappy when we on-charged these fees.”
3x improvement in payment success
Gilles was impressed by GoCardless’s confidence that it could outperform the incumbent on success rate – and he hasn’t been disappointed.
“Our payment success rate with GoCardless is three times better than before, and the impact was surprisingly quick – almost instant,” he said. “And when payments do fail, the cost is nine times lower. It’s almost zero, actually.”
Cash also lands in the bank twice as fast, catapulting the company’s cashflow performance into a different league. “GoCardless pays out daily so we capture cash more quickly,” said Gilles. “Our Days Sales Outstanding has halved from 15 to 7 days.”
More (and better) data
Not only are failed payments less common and less costly, GoCardless also provides more insights into the reasons behind any failures. These insights are helping Gilles to build a better business.
“GoCardless provides a wealth of data on payment failures, which we can view in Chargebee thanks to the direct integration,” he said.
“Having a single place from which to identify any significant variations that need investigating is a massive help in my role as CFO, and means we can constantly optimise our cash management operations.”
Set up for success
Trustup’s dedicated GoCardless Customer Success Manager ran point on their implementation and is an ongoing source of insights.
“Switching payment solutions is always a risk but it was a really professional process,” said Gilles.
Our Customer Success Manager provided clear planning for the phased migration of customer mandates. And throughout the process I could tell just how much our success and satisfaction mattered to the team at GoCardless.
“The team is always responsive and they’ve helped us make several tweaks to our processes designed to keep payment success rates high. For example, their advice around ensuring our company name appears on customers’ bank statements has made it far less likely they’ll cancel their mandate.”
Built for scale
Most Trustup customers now pay by GoCardless and Gilles is looking to grow this number, given the correlation between manually paying customers and late payments.
80% of customers pay by GoCardless and we’re now orienting sales reps to encourage new customers to opt into GoCardless payments from the start.
“This will be a massive advantage as we grow," he added. "We plan to expand through Europe and because GoCardless is built for scale we’re confident it will be key to our future. I’d recommend GoCardless to any fast-moving company looking to grow.”
