An appetite for A/R automation
With total funding of $6.5 million, Chowly was on an ambitious growth path and boasted thousands of customers who found Chowly’s POS integration technology could solve big problems with manual data entry and overall inefficiency.
Because restaurant operators often have many suppliers but aren’t outfitted with professional accounts payable teams, even the best intentioned among them sometimes aren’t the best at paying.
This common issue affected Chowly like many others. Realizing this issue, they sought a solution that would address the problem that aligned with their mission: simplifying technology for restaurants. While Chowly first considered developing its own automated billing and collections workflows, the management team soon realized building internally would be disadvantageous to a specialized, third party solution for three important reasons:
- Solution strength. The solution Chowly might come up with on its own likely wouldn’t match the quality of a platform provided by a vendor specializing in the space.
- Time to market. Chowly needed a solution quickly. If it took the time needed to develop its own solution, it would have taken months instead of a few weeks to implement an existing, road-tested solution.
- Opportunity cost. By spending time and scarce developer resources on creating its own solution, Chowly would be foregoing capacity to drive its core product roadmap forward.
Once the build vs. buy implications were fully understood, Chowly co- founder and Chief Product Officer, Justin McNally, started to look for solutions.
Invoiced: A true platform for solving many different billing and collections problems
After conducting an extensive search for the right solution, McNally ultimately identified Invoiced as the best possible solution, and one that could uniquely satisfy the vast majority of Chowly’s requirements out of the box.
Because Invoiced is a true platform vs. a narrowly focused product, tool or point solution, Chowly’s team realized they would have plenty of growing room as new use cases emerged and their business evolved. But they immediately took advantage of a slew of specific Invoiced capabilities that made their A/R automation starting point one that would prove to be high-impact:
- Automated email reminders consolidated multiple outstanding invoices into total balances and included Pay Now links.
- A branded customer payment portal let Chowly clients pay individual bills, manage payment methods, view their billing and payment history, download account statements and more.
- Chowly could begin accepting ACH payments, among other methods; they could also make AutoPay available for customers.
- Chowly could create sign-up pages that allowed customers to enter payment information and setup AutoPay right from the company’s onboarding process.
- Chowly enjoyed a streamlined, accurate migration process with their accounting data from Xero.
- Invoiced assisted Chowly with the seamless migration of thousands of clients including their AutoPay and payment method tokens.
While Invoiced covered all the basics that Chowly needed to address its immediate challenges, Chowly’s team was able to plan for growth, change and further optimization with Invoiced’s expansive platform.
The Results: Dramatically improved A/R metrics and team efficiency
Faster payment
The immediate change in payment velocity Chowly experienced earned board-level attention. Chowly reported a 53% increase in on-time collections in the first quarter of implementing Invoiced. And the company reduced its Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) by 28% in just the first month.
Team time savings
By implementing Invoiced, Chowly found that having software take on the majority of mundane, repetitive communication and follow up activities created more capacity for their finance team members to focus on developing their skills and working on higher impact, strategic initiatives.
A better payment experience for customers
In addition to recognizing measurable business benefits, Chowly was able to provide a contemporary and even enjoyable payment and billing management experience for customers. By giving restaurant operators the flexibility to pay online and set up AutoPay they were able to offer a payment experience that matched the ease of use and polish of Chowly’s own software.