Sipping Champagne in a Beer Economy
Increasing Cash on Hand to Weather Economic Uncertainty
The Challenge:
Lean team spending too much time collecting cash
Since 2008, Chargent has been on the Salesforce AppExchange, enabling customers to take payments anywhere in Salesforce.
Like many small SaaS and subscription businesses, Chargent’s team wears many hats. For their billing team, time spent chasing down late and failed payments meant less time to focus on projects that would help them to scale the business, including several high-priority compliance projects with tight deadlines. In order to accomplish everything they were tasked with, they needed to consider two options: add additional headcount or find new efficiencies in their operations. Their current AR process was cumbersome and manual, including:
- Relying on weekly reports to identify issues that would prevent them from capturing payments.
- Opening Salesforce Service Cloud cases to kick off the process of reaching out to customers by phone and email.
- Identifying the correct person to contact for each failed payment by navigating switchboards and bounced emails.
The Solution:
Sip their own champagne and implement Automated Collections
The Chargent team was ready to sip their own champagne and implement Automated Collections for their subscription and usage billing customers. Setup was simple – the Billing Manager configured Automated Collections in one afternoon, in between meetings, without any assistance from the developer team. She reported that the most time-consuming part of the entire process was customizing each email in the flow. She was able to:
- Enter all failed payments into the Automated Collections workflow instantly.
- Monitor and adjust variables like email messaging and retry logic based on real customer data presented in out-of-the-box dashboards.
- Collect on nearly 60% of failed payments without any intervention.
The Results:
Improved cash flow and accelerated growth
“Since implementing Automated Collections, Chargent has lowered DSO by 43%. The impact on AR is significant – it added an extra zero to the cash balance in our forecast.”
Even as a small B2B business charging thousands, not tens of thousands, of customers, Chargent saw an immediate impact:
- Cash flow increased by 9% thereby accelerating their strategic roadmap without taking on additional financing.
- Cash recovered through Automated Collections recouped the annual price of Automated Collections in just over 90 days.
- DSO was lowered by 43%, so new team members were onboarded earlier than anticipated.
And most importantly for a thriving SaaS company, to maintain focus where it matters – on improving the customer experience and scaling for growth.
Additional Helpful Resources
Whether you’re ready to implement new software today, or are not quite yet ready to make the investment, below are resources that can help you decide the next steps to take. When the time comes, you’ll enjoy increased revenue, improved operational efficiencies and increased customer satisfaction.
