RON: Having those cards registered as well means that I can go in—and you just said it a few seconds ago—go about working on those refunds and subscriptions. I'm automatically emailed and notified when my card is charged each month. I mean, how many times do we get these bills where people are auto debiting our account so we just never know about it? Well, that's what this portal is. This third party payment portal will literally have a recording of every single invoice, every single payment that's made. And so it's really easy for me to go in and find out exactly, in this pay portal, what they're charging me and what I can pay on anything that's outstanding.
CHRIS: And that is outstanding. And I think it's really interesting, because we've worked with a lot of clients over the years. They run into challenges with some of the different systems that they're using and the different tools. They typically get painted into a corner, if you will, and then can't necessarily customize everything. So I think that's really powerful.
Now, obviously, one of the main things that we're doing here is, we're enabling invoicing and we're making an integrated payment hub, a self-service portal. So let's talk a little bit about invoicing. Tell me about some of the issues there and what we've implemented so that folks can address those for their clients.
RON: A lot of times, what ends up happening is, these manufacturing companies spend a lot of money—and it could be B2B, it could be D2C, it doesn't really matter—but when they go to send and ship these units out, these units can cost five bucks. They can cost $500,000. They want to capture those funds.
But a lot of times what ends up happening is they've negotiated with their clients to be able to pay on account. So at the time of purchase in the eCommerce, there is no authorization hold on a credit card, and then they turn around and ship it, and now they have to send an invoice. And they're crossing their fingers they're going to be paid net 30. But the person paying that payment might write a check and send it on day 30 and go, “Yeah, I made the payment within 30 days,” but they may not get it for another week or two and then it's another five days to clear their account. So it's really frustrating to capture these payments, especially these larger payments.
So what this enables, it allows us—the second that they shipped that product or marked that order fulfilled—we can automatically push that invoice from the ERP into the payment portal, send a text or an email to the user going, “Hey, your item shipped, here's your bill. You have 30 days to pay your bill.” So before it even reaches them, they've already started that 30-day count, right? So it speeds up their payments quite a bit.
Now all of a sudden the person gets a proactive notification that the invoice is there, then they can come in, look at the invoice, and in a single click, pick their credit card, click a button, and pay their invoice. And now those funds can be captured immediately. So what we're ended up doing is, we're making it extremely convenient and fully self-service for the end-user to get proactive notifications, single-click payment processing, full historical records and printing invoices, and they can go back years and see all the invoices they've ever paid, right?
So it's really super helpful for the end-user, but for the business it's meaning that sometimes they're shortening their delays of payments by two, three, four weeks for every single payment across their business. I mean, that just adds up to so much money over time, and it's a lot easier to track. Because the payments are captured in real-time, we don't have to deal with manual paper checks, delays, and trying to put it in the bank, and checks bouncing and trying to collect late funds and things like that. That almost all goes away with the hub, right? Everything's automated.