Steve of SixFifty Technologies is embracing payments tech to get paid faster

Tackling late payments

Utah-based SixFifty Technologies is an automated legal services platform specialising in employment law for small to medium businesses with operations in the United States. Companies without an in-house legal team can use SixFifty to get access to world-class legal services on subscription.

Chief Operating Officer Steve Plowman uses Xero for invoicing and reporting and, like many small businesses, spends a lot of his time chasing late payments from customers. Each month, around a third of payments are overdue, and it takes an average 45 days to collect payment. For Steve, this is a huge improvement — when he first joined the company, that figure was up to six months in some cases.

With a mix of monthly, quarterly, and annual upfront billings, the company has to manage a mix of different customer types, billing frequencies and payment types, with some customers continuing to pay in checks. As a small team of 40, SixFifty has few resources to dedicate purely to billing.

“We're counting on payments to run our business. We need timely payments in order to map out when we're going to make our payrolls and pay our vendors. And so if customers don't pay on time, it's a challenge for us,” Steve says.

Improving the payments workflow for customers

Steve has focused on improving the payments and collections workflow, ensuring the company bills clients more consistently, offering more types of payments such as credit cards, and setting up automated reminders. Even then, some customers require manual reminders to pay, but the hybrid of automation and some human touch is a big reason that delinquent payments have drastically reduced.

“'I’d say around half of our customers require manual follow-up but the other half are prompted by the automated reminders generated by Xero,” Steve says. “So it definitely is making things easier by having the amount of follow up I am required to do.

The sales tax rates for different states are a challenge for many small businesses to navigate in the US. While Steve has been calculating this manually, the business has recently signed with Avalara – which integrates with Xero – to automatically calculate these sales tax rates across state borders.

One other area that has helped SixFifty’s operations within Xero is through the app store integration with BILL. Using this integration makes it easy for SixFifty to pay vendors and to track down internal approvals automatically to streamline our procurement process.

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