The ezyCollect roadmap to eliminate late B2B payments

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The ezyCollect roadmap for eliminating late B2B payments

Webinar Transcript

Select the tabs below to read the transcript of different sections of the webinar. Or check out the webinar recap for the key takeaways.

Introduction

AJ Singh:

Welcome again to everyone who’s joined us today from all over the world, where we have our customers and our clients and prospects as well. Really excited to be sharing this webinar with you, and it’s really a conversation between us and you and Ricardo, who’s our CTO and is passionate about product as well, about where we’re going with ezyCollect. And why we are sharing this with you is because we really want to explain to you why we’re building certain features and what the end game is for us. And so, today is really kind of an, I would say, informal webinar and it’d be very chatty between Ricardo and myself to talk about what we’re doing, explain the reasons why we’re doing it.

And we’d love to get feedback. But because it’s a webinar and it’s in listen only mode, if you have any questions or you have any comments, please use the chat box or the Q&A box on the bottom of your Zoom and we’ll be able to address all questions at the end. So just before we get started into the actual content, it’s always useful for us to know what you want to get from today’s webinar. So, we have a little poll that we’ll be launching in a few seconds, and if you just take a minute or so just to fill that up, that would be great. I’ll just pause while you guys do that.

So, we’ll make sure we tailor the webinar to what you also want to get from today’s session and that’s why we’ve asked that poll question. So just while you’re filling out that poll, let’s move on to the next section, which is, who are your speakers? And, in case you don’t know who we are, my name’s AJ. I’m one of the co-founders and CEO of ezyCollect. And, I passionately believe in what we’re doing, because I’ve been in, I guess, your shoes as the client, where I’ve run a business and I’ve had the pain of late payment, where customers were not paying me on time and I’ve been super stressed because I’m so worried, “When will they pay me? Will they pay me? Will it be a bad debt?”

Back then I tried many, many things to get paid faster, hiring more people, putting in more systems, putting in different policies and processes. And, it’s hard, and that’s the honest truth. And, when I sold that business, I got onto the mission of, “How do I make it easier for businesses to get paid faster?” And, that’s how ezyCollect was born. And so, today we have 80 people and customers across the world, which is super exciting and really glad to be sharing our vision. Ricardo has been my co-pilot on the journey and I’ll let Ricardo explain and introduce himself.

Ricardo Hori:

Hi everyone, I’m Ricardo. I’m the CTO here at ezyCollect. I have been through most of the journey so far here with AJ since we were just a small team of five people. And, it’s really been an amazing journey helping out you, our clients. And also, AJ got that vision out of his head into a product that can help everyone run a better business. And, that’s really what we’re here to talk about and it’s really exciting, because we have a lot of work our teams have been putting on to make this easier and easier for you. So, it’s a pleasure to be here and to be able to show a little bit of our work so far.

Agenda

AJ Singh:

Yep. Yeah. And so, we’ll get into it. So look, before we start any session on the roadmap, let’s set the storyline that we’re going to be taking you through.

The first thing we’re going to talk about, I guess, why are we building certain products and how are we building those products to help you get paid faster? And we talk about it in context of the Order-to-Cash cycle. The Order-to-Cash cycle is a term, if you’re not familiar with it, is when you first work with a particular prospect that you want to do business with, it starts there. So, how do I work with a prospect, how do I get orders, all the way to, how do I get cash back in my bank?”
We’ll then go to our roadmap as to, not the whole roadmap, that’ll be a five hour webinar, but what are the three key areas we’re focusing on that are going to, we believe, help you get paid faster? And, some of it is being built, some is going to be built. And we’ll do a hands-on demo and show you what’s live and what’s coming. And, we really want your feedback.
And, the product demo is kind of part of step two above.
And then, Q&A. Please ask lots of questions. If it’s not clear, just ask. If you’re not happy about things, just tell us. We have clients, we have customers, we have prospects on the call today, so please feel free to share your thoughts and we can address it today at the end of the webinar.

Now, with any webinar about product roadmap, we’ve got to start as to why we exist and what’s our mission statement? And, really, for ezyCollect, there’re two key things. It’s to eliminate late payment and to help you grow your business faster. And, when we look at it internally in the business, we have a term that we say, “Zero days late.” We’re very much striving to, not just help you get paid faster, but actually zero days late. That’s the aim. So, why should you ever have an invoice that’s overdue at all, right? And, that drives us, it’s what is our single guiding star. And, when you think about zero days late, it’s about saying, “You know what? We have to really reinvent how businesses think about B2B.” And so, let’s now get into the order-to-cash cycle and explain how we are going to live our mission

The 7 steps of the order-to-cash cycle (O2C)

AJ Singh:

So, the order-to-cash cycle, which is a term which some of you may or may not be familiar with, this is a high level summary of what you live every day in your business. And, it looks complicated because it is complicated. There are lots of moving parts, there’s lots of friction in this process, and often there’re different departments involved in a business during this whole process. If I just walk you through it, step one above here, is, and not all businesses do this really well, some do it well, is how do you give customers credit? How do you actually extend credit? The number of businesses that we know today that are using PDF forms that are on their website that they send to their customers and the customers can hand write it or fill it in and they fax it or email it back, it’s still being done and it’s still very manual, it’s still very not data driven.

Meaning that, when someone’s filling out an application, how do you kno-w what they’re saying is true? How do you know what they’re saying is correct? When they give you trade references, how do you know those are actually valid trade references? And then, what’s the risk of the business? So, the whole credit approval process we feel can be done better, and that can help you run a better business. So, we’ll focus a bit in spending time there, because that’s even before the invoice gets created. It’s before you even have a late payment. Let’s give you the best tools upfront. Then when you have it, the process is, then I have to get the order from my customer, I have to order the inventory in if I don’t have the stock, I have to then fulfill the order.

If you’re a services business, then it’s a time and material thing. If you’re a wholesaler or a manufacturer, you’ve got to then ship the goods. Once you ship it, you’ve got to then raise the invoicing and then you have to make sure your customer gets the invoice. And, once they get it, you have to adhere in number five, chase the customers, help make it easy for them to get paid. And, chasing itself is a very involved process, and Ricardo will talk a lot more about that.And, as ezyCollect, we want to eliminate chasing. We think you don’t need to chase an invoice. We don’t want you to. If you look at our future of our roadmap, it’s not about chasing invoices. We want to make this process so much more seamless, and I’ll let Ricardo talk a bit more about that. But, these are the processes today that exist in businesses. And then, when you do get paid, how do I reconcile that back into my accounting system? How do I make sure that what I did get paid is updated correctly? And then, how do I report my profitability and my GP back to the business? And, it all starts again. And, if you’re raising lots of invoices in a month, this is a very costly process. And any delay in this process is going to cost you money.

And so, my heart goes out to businesses because I’ve lived there myself. The order-to-cash process is complicated. Getting paid on time is not a simple problem to solve.

How O2C affects AR & Payment collections

AJ Singh:

And, again, it looks like a complicated diagram, but I just want to get you to understand how we see the world of order-to-cash, in terms of accounts receivables and payments. And there’s a lot of cost and money tied up in the order-to-cash cycle. And if we can help you get paid faster and reduce that day’s sales outstanding, what we call DSO, there’s a massive impact for you. A business turning over $10 million a year, if they can reduce their day’s sales outstanding by five days, they’re unlocking 50, $60,000 of extra working capital every month. There’s a lot of cash stuck in here. And, if you look at it, this is for a wholesale business. This is an example of where there’s an order placed by your customer. Then you have to go and maybe order the actual goods in.

So let’s say you have to order some goods from a third party or from overseas. Then when you order the goods in, you got to pay for the goods. So there’s payables that you have, then there’s days that’s actually sitting in your warehouse as inventory which is costing you money. So the faster you can sell it the better. And then when you actually invoice the customer, you’re like, yeah, I’m done. Happy days, I’ve sold it. But really a sale isn’t a sale till you get paid. And this is kind of where you have days in receivables when you expect to get paid and then when you actually get paid. And in between this whole process is that whole chasing and reconciliation process. It’s a lot of moving parts here. So when we look at our mission of eliminating late pavement, we’re thinking about this whole process, not just the receivables, not just the inventory.

We’re thinking about it from the very start. How do you make it such that you don’t have to do any of these manual tasks? And I want you just to think about that because that’s how we think about it. We’re not thinking about how do we make our chasing system better? How do we make our collection system so that you can send lots of SMSs and emails? We think that’s good and you might need that, but we want our future roadmap is all about zero days late.

Change the culture in B2B payments through creating mutual value

AJ Singh:

So such said, you never ever have to chase an invoice again. And it takes a while to really think about it and understand how can we do that so that it’s a win-win for your clients and for you? It doesn’t have to be like you guys are battling your clients to pay you and you are on different sides.

It’s not like, hey, I want to pay me and the customers like, no, I want to delay payment. There is a world where we can have a win win, where your customer actually will pay you on time and you will give them something of extra value so that they do pay you on time. And that’s what we want to talk to you about today. We believe we’ve built up a roadmap in this win-win kind of quadrant where your customer feels they’re winning, you feel that you’ll win and you’re creating mutual value and it’s not a zero sub game. That is really where the roadmap is focusing on is the win-win. And that’s something which I’m sure in one webinar is not enough to talk about it, but we’ll touch on a few of the key things that we’re doing in this section. So before I move on to the next section, Ricardo, were you going to say something?

Ricardo Hori:

First one is from Susan, what about delivery dispute management? So 80% of late payments due to dispute of some kind as part of the OTC process.

AJ Singh:

Yep. So when you say dispute management, if this is the Susan I’m thinking about, that’s a great question if that’s the Susan. So when you say dispute management, maybe we should understand, is it a dispute on a sort of invoice value? Is it a dispute on the payment date? Is it a dispute on, what is the dispute? Because there’s lots of different ways to look at that. And perhaps Ricardo, when you touch on your section, you can talk about how we can manage that as well through the process. And so, I’m not sure exactly what the question. I can’t, maybe Ricardo if you have some, I’m not sure exactly how to answer that question, or Susan, if you can be a bit more specific, that would be helpful.

AJ Singh:

Yeah, I was saying but disputes do definitely lengthen the order to cash process, that’s for sure. And there are things that we have in the product today but also, which I think Ricardo will touch on. But, so if you want to give us a bit more details, we’re happy to kind of address it directly.

Ricardo Hori:

She gave some more details but just say could be A&E for example, a delivery pricing error and how does one manage it within ezyCollect?

AJ Singh:

Okay, so let’s just note that down Ricardo. And then after you do your section, we’ll circle back to that Susan and explain to you maybe some ways that we could look at doing that within the new roadmap or within the current product.

Three critical areas of focus to ‘0’ days late

AJ Singh:

kay. All right. So if we have the lens of this win-win where we’re trying to focus on, I want to now move to what are the three critical areas that we want to talk to you about today? Some we’ve built, some we are building more of and some are yet to go, right? But it’s really important that if we want to get to be involved early in the process and create this win-win environment, there are really three things that we want to talk to you about today.

1. Best practice credit approval

One is we want to talk about at the very start of the process, right, before you even invoice the customer. How do you onboard customers? And this is something which we’ve been talking about for the last probably six months. And it’s one that I’ll touch on, just I’ll show it to people who don’t know it briefly. I think it’s really important.

2. Introduce automation earlier in the process

3. Auto-Collect and Auto-Reconcile

AJ Singh:

But really number two and three, which is what Ricardo will talk about is about getting involved much earlier in the process. So when you talk about disputes and issues with this, we’ll focus on how we are looking at collections. And I think the best way number two and three is for Ricardo to show it to you. So I won’t spend too much time on number two and three, but I’ll go straight now into the number one, which is the credit application process.

Focus 1: Best practice onboarding

AJ Singh:

Now with the credit application process, if you are using ezyCollect and you’re a customer, I guess I want you to think about how you’re doing it today.

AJ Singh:

A lot of businesses today that we talked to, even existing customers who have now changed, were using PDF forms. And there was no data behind the actual process of onboarding new customers. And I guess what I want to share with you today is I feel that if you want to run a better business and you want to work with good customers and not bad debts, you need to use data in your whole process. So what we’ve built is a way for you to do two things:

1. Have a way to send your customers on your brand a digital application form that makes you shine, shows, hey, I’m a professional company, this is my brand, this is how I’m going to send you an application form to deal with me.

2. And then step two is we’ve built a lot of data into the forms such that you can make better decisions on who you should work with and how you should work with them.

So for example, as a business, you will come into ezyCollect. You can very simply customize an application form the way you would like to. And when you customize an application form, you add your terms and conditions, you add your privacy policy, you add any details that are relevant and then the system will automatically generate a link that you can use throughout your system. You can put it on your website, you can give it to your sales reps to send to their customers. And what the application form does, it’s the first window a prospect has into your business. So they come and they say, “Hey, this is my application form.” They click start. And from the get go, your prospect sees a really nice looking I guess digital form on how they can interact with you. And this form is like a smart form, you put in business numbers, it’ll go to ASIC, which is our different business registries and prefill company names. You can custom can type in their trading name and then so on and so forth.

AJ Singh:

I won’t go through every single field here because that’ll take a while. But you can say, hey, I want to extend this person this much credit. And it might be a case of when you extend someone credit, it’s, let me put their software. It might be you have something like internal rules. If it’s under $2,000 of credit, you can make that decision yourself. If it’s over $2,000 it goes to a third party. So the different ways to run this process. But what you can do is fill in, they can fill in the contacts, their address, they put in their directors, they can upload documents like driver’s licenses, put in their trade references and at the end they actually digitally sign the form and accept your Ts and Cs. And once that’s done, that’s the first part. This is your on brand messaging. Then, how do we bring data into the process?

So once it’s actually been completed, you then as the AR clerk or the finance manager or the CFO comes into the ezyCollect system and you can see what the customer’s filled in, how much credit have they asked for, what are the documents that they’ve actually uploaded? And then you can say, before I call my trade references, let me see if these guys are a good risk or a bad risk. So what it does, it’ll through the company look up, it’ll prefill and say, okay, these are the actual directors of the business. Is this what they said in the form? Do they actually complete the right information? So you can start to check some cross directorships and then you can start to get scores. And these scores are coming from a third party credit reporting bureau. So this is a bureau whose main job is to assess the risk of companies.

So what you’re seeing and Ricardo said in his intro, he eats data for breakfast, lunch and dinner. These are the kind of things which helps us know that we are on the right path in terms of roadmap in getting you paid on time. Because if you get the right customers, you’ll give them the right amount of credit. If someone had a really high risk score, you could either say no, this is not the right customer to work for. Or you could go and get an actual credit report through the system and then go deeper and make that decision yourself. This with your reference checks, I’m not saying don’t do reference checks, this combined with reference checks will make you run a better business, you’ll make better decisions. And this is a really important part in the process and as part of this whole onboarding and getting the right customers on board, you can go in and type in a customer name, get a score on the customer in the same exact way.

So I guess the main point of what I was trying to show you in this first focus was really about just working with the right customers to ensure that you are minimizing bad debt. That’s the point of what I was trying to say here. And with our mission of zero days late, this is focus number one and we’re investing a lot of time in this space such that, and this is my final point here, is when you’re a customer, if you are going to extend trade terms to your customer, one thing is we are trying to focus on more and more is can you actually capture their bank details or their credit card details upfront in the application process? Because if you can capture those details and we can as easily store them for you securely in a PCI compliant way, then potentially how do we use that information such that you don’t have to ever chase a customer?

For example, if I say to my customer, I’ll give you five days extra credit terms if you give me your banking details so I can auto direct debit you on the due date, would that be a win-win situation? And if that is okay, then guess what? That’s one step towards what we are building to say we want to empower you so that you can capture those details and then you can use that in the ezyCollect to automatically debit them on the due date. And this is what now Ricardo will go into deep and show you how we actually do that. So over to you Ricardo.

Ricardo Hori:

Cool, thanks AJ. Just to compliment one little bit as well, we do recognize that not everyone requires the same information on the forms and the application process. So we can work with you to edit or change that forum to fit your business needs as well. So if you’re interested in something like that, you can just get in touch with us for CS team and we’ll be happy to work with you to get your setup. Cool. So I will share my screen.

Q&A

Ricardo Hori:

So what do each of the scores represent, the failure risk and the late payment risk?

That’s a great question Susan. So the late payment score, so the way this is done is based on collection of data over time by the external party, the credit bureau. And they’re basically looking at how often is that customer paying late, and especially in 90 plus days. And the more receivables that were paid at 90 plus, the higher their score.

So it’s just indicating what is the odds or is the chance of you getting severely paid severely late by the customer? That’s the late payment risk. While the failure risk is looking more at the odds of that company having a serious failure event like having some core actions against them or maybe even a chance of failure and winding up. And that’s looking basically at legal actions and also time of operations and a few other metrics that they keep track of again all over a period of time. And before there is enough reasonable data to make any assumptions that there would be no score for that client.

Okay, so cool, thanks Susan.

Ricardo Hori:

Another one from Jake.

Questions in regards to when a client still doesn’t pay, what is a general flow of action that’s in place?

So actually that’s a very interesting question because I have something really interesting to show you guys about this. So let me just share my screen real quick. And we’re jumping to, I built a quick flow. So this flow is based on our conversations with clients and it’s a fairly common scenario. Maybe all of it applies to you, maybe it’s missing some for you, maybe it doesn’t all apply to you, but I’ll go quickly through that flow. Of course the first part here is that your customer wants to make a purchase.

So you can see he has a bag of money and he wants to get some diamond.s so he’ll get in your e-store, maybe he’ll just send you an email with a purchase order, maybe he’ll just give you a call.There are so many ways that transactions happen in B2B and we are aware of that. And then there are a few things that can happen here. So for example, you’ll create a sales order, send that to the customer. We have clients that are basically only looking at 90% is just sales orders and they collect the full payment there. And the green here is that we do the reconciliation automatically by applying those payments to the sales orders.

So for example, if it’s a NetSuite, you would see a deposit come in and the deposit will be applied to that sales order. So when you fulfill it, it’s already all paid for. Okay? And I’ll get into the lower payment authority a little bit later. Let’s just go through a normal flow without the authority first. Then let’s say the order is fulfilled and you build the remaining balance based on whatever terms has already been agreed.

Ricardo Hori:

So I’m not touching that onboarding, which AJ already described. And this is where ezyCollect starts today, right? So you are able to send the invoice to the client once the invoice is issued and maybe set up a pre-reminder before that invoice is overdue. Then the invoice becomes overdue and we get to Jake’s question where unfortunately you didn’t get paid. And that happens very often, let’s just be real about it. We wish it didn’t. But here that’s what we live for to make this easier.

So in ezyCollect you can automatically set up a workflow, you can send a few reminders, you’re probably at some point sending a notification that they’re going to be on credit hold. And worse comes to worse, you’re going to start getting into the legal path. You send a letter of demand, register a default or send them to debt collection. And if nothing works, then you write off that debt. So this is the traditional collection process which ezyCollect helps you automate.

AJ Singh:

And Jake, just to your point, all that can be done within ezyCollect today. But this is what we have today. It’s not the future of the product, right? This is what we, and you can see it looks really complicated because it is. There’s so many steps there, right? Yeah.

Ricardo Hori:

So the little stone man here. And then, if everything goes well, you probably collect the outstanding balance or at least part of it if it’s through that collection agency. And then you still have to go back into your accounting system, create the records, make sure you reconcile the payments and afterwards you do a bank rec and there you go. You managed to manage a couple of invoices right? Now the problem is what if you’re issuing 50 invoices a week right? Now let’s just zoom out here a little bit and take a look at this. This is a lot of work and this is every time you have a couple of invoices per customer, you are going through this entire process, right? And let me just stop here and give a shout out to all the men and women that give their time to make sure their business receivables are healthy and go through this every day and also make sure that all the records are precisely recorded in the accounting system.

Because if it’s not precise, that’s also going to be a problem. And we recognize this is a lot of work and we got your back. This is what inspires us to build products and make sure we can help you. So let’s show you an alternative to this. So our future roadmap, so it’s very focused on reducing any or the majority of the manual steps or the steps that someone has to actually do in order to accomplish this process. And the reason we’re saying automation early reduces your risk is because if you can get, for example, a payment authority at the beginning, so the customer still doesn’t have the product, and we can work out on how we can increase the odds that your customer is going to give you an authority for the payments to automatically be taken for that purchase.

Ricardo Hori:

So in terms of what is a payment authority, I’ll just quickly show you how we do it in ezyCollect. So basically you have, sorry, let me just move some things around. You have a direct debit authority here. Sorry, let me just go back into the customer. In your ezyCollect file there will be a box here saying direct debit authority. All you have to do is click request now, I’ll just take this logo out, and send an email to your customer. I’ll just preview it so you can see. In that email it has a link, set up direct debit, which you can put here as one of the merge fields, and it will open. And then when your customer opens that link, he’ll be prompted to give you the authority to charge either his credit card or his bank account.

And it went directly to the bank account mode. But I’ll show you because I have, this is our test environment, so I apologize, there must be something going on at this moment right now, but I have it here as a screenshot so you can see it. It’ll prompt him with a form. Very simple, he’s just putting his credit card details and as soon as he confirms you have the authority. Once you have the authority, a lot of the steps can be automated. So let me show you a little bit what are the things that you can do with it. The first one is what we call collect now.

AJ Singh:

Ricardo, if you pause, just go back for a second to that [inaudible 00:30:14] screen. For some of you on the call, a direct of authority isn’t like a new thing. You guys already are capturing it today, maybe offline. What I think Ricardo and I want to show you is what you can do with the authority. ow you can automate your process with it? Having the authority isn’t innovative. Capturing an authority has been around for many years for many businesses. But what we want to show you now is if you have the authority, how can we, it’s not what you have, it’s like what you can do with it. And I think that’s what we want to focus on. I just want to make that point Ricardo because a lot of our clients here say, oh, we have an authority, so what? So this is what we can do with it.

Ricardo Hori:

If you have an authority, that is great news, right? Because that makes your lives just so much easier. So one example for this, let’s say you got a sales order, you are at this stage and you already have an authority. So you can just come in here and to use ezyCollect file, take a look at your sales orders, the sales orders. So in the list below, you just click the sales order, click, click now. Now here is the authority that you already have. So it’s a saved tokenized card, which is PCI compliant, and you can just click collect now. And that’s it. So by the time you did that, not only the payment was collected, all the emails have been sent out notifying that the payment was processed and also the records were already created in your accounting system. So you can go ahead and fulfill that order. So it just makes life much, much easier.

AJ Singh:

So Ricardo, are you saying the sales order then writes back, we write the paper back to the sales order?

Ricardo Hori:

So again, in the NetSuite for example, the deposit would’ve been created to the correct accounts and that deposit would also be associated with the sales order. So you can just go ahead and fulfill that order. And then once the invoice is built, if it was a partial deposit, then that payment will be automatically associated to the invoice. Given the reducing the total amount, you’ll just have to invoice the outstanding balance there.

And so, this is one of the capabilities, but with having an authority, you’re also able to collect any invoices that you want. So you can just go ahead, go into physical, this is a 5,870 days. Again this is just our test file, but you could select that and you could collect it now or you could just schedule it, maybe you got on the phone with the client and then say, look, having some trouble, can we get the payment done next Thursday? And you’re like, look, that’s all right but can I schedule that payment? So you got a commitment. A commitment that’s not just words, that’s also like okay you are okay to charge. So you just can just come in here and choose next Thursday.

AJ Singh:

And I’ll just pause it because there’s a question that says from someone, I already have a direct debit. I’ll just say it again because maybe I wasn’t clear. The question just came up, I already have a direct debit. What’s different about ezyCollect solution? And just to say again is in that example that Ricardo just showed with the invoice of the schedule payment, on the date that we’ve set up for the schedule, let’s say three or four days later, it will not only take the payment but it’ll also apply it. What’s different is A, you can schedule the future date, which is probably not as new because people can’t schedule direct debits in the future. But it will also then apply that payment back into the accounting system. I think that’s a really important part, which we can’t underestimate because Ricardo showed the number of steps it takes from collecting and chasing and reconciliation that’s so manual. That application might sound simple but it’s not right. And we do that seamlessly. Of course, sometimes we have issues, but where possible it’s as seamless as it can be. And it applies a payment.

Ricardo Hori:

Yeah, the reconciliation, making sure that everything is there. And so either invoice or sales orders, we always take care of the reconciliation along with the payment, which is very important and it’s just also very easy to use. So if you already have direct debits, you’re one step ahead because also part of the platform is not just the direct debits but also how can we help you get those agreements in place? And that’s what AJ was referring to, which is part of our roadmaps. Okay, so maybe you want to extend a few extra days credit for extra day terms so you can have a win-win scenario with your customer. So if you already have the direct debit, that’s amazing because we can import that and enable this for you. And one of the other big benefits that you get from it is what is a new feature we have called auto collect.

Now if we go back to this flow, at some point here, the remaining balance becomes an invoice and that will be with whatever the credit terms is for that account. And you can drastically reduce the risk of that being a late payment by simply enabling auto collect. Now if you enable auto collect, and you can see here that I have it enabled in the global level, but you also configure it in the customer. So for Westing Galleria, Houston, I have auto collect enabled. And you can see that for invoices that are not yet due, what auto collect will do is whenever it’s the due date, so in this case 27th of July, it’ll automatically process the payment. So send the receipts, whenever necessary, send a copy to you, go back to your accounting system, write back everything precisely whenever it happens and then you’re done, right? You don’t need to worry about, oh, am I going to get paid or I’m not going to get paid?

It just happens automatically. It reconciles for you so you don’t have to worry about it. And of course we understand that not always everything is great. So you will get a report every day saying, okay, this is what is scheduled for collection today. Just in case there is a dispute for example. And you want to say, no, look better to deactivate for this one until we can get that dispute sorted. And then once you’re ready to go ahead with it, you can just come back here and do a collect now or do a schedule payments after that dispute has been resolved.

AJ Singh:

And look, I’ll just take a second. The auto collect is a real game changer in my mind in terms of that win-win changing the culture of zero days late. How do you make it such that you don’t have to even chase? So it’s time saving but it’s also a big change. And one of the big things that we’ve had, there’s a question here from, I believe it’s Karen, right? And you’ve said, how do we turn off pre-reminders for some customers and not for others? I would say to you, why even remind a customer in the very first place?

If you can focus on getting direct debits, and sorry, and I will answer that question too Karen, but if you can get direct debits in place, you don’t have to worry about pre-reminders or anything. It just will debit them on the due date because you have the authority to debit them on the due date and it will reconcile it back into your accounting system. So that’s one thing, it’s a bit of a culture change.

AJ Singh:

How do you get customers to capture direct debits? And one of the big ways to capture direct debits is you have to give your customers something as well. Like capturing a payment authority so you can auto collect is difficult because you’re asking your customer to give you access to debiting their account automatically. What’s the win for them? What’s the win for them? So maybe, you have to say if someone does give me a direct payment authority, I’ll give them five or seven days extra credit terms. So that’s the win. I talked about the win-win circle. So maybe one of the things we should, if you are open to exploring this further is we go to all our customers, all your customers and say, hey, we’ll give everyone who wants seven days more terms, give us your payment authority and we’ll debit you. Or perhaps in your application form when you first onboard a customer, that’s just the way you do business. You need to say for seven days extra credit terms or 10 extra days credit terms, you capture their payment authority on file. Once it’s done once, game over, right?

Ricardo Hori:

That’s it.

AJ Singh:

That’s it. Right? And just to answer your question, Karen, right now pre-reminders are turned on or off for all your customer. If you wanted to have it turned on for some and not for others, we would have to split your file based on the type of customers that you want it for and the ones that you don’t want it for today. And if you want, just get in touch with myself or Ricardo after this and we can show you how to do that in terms of pre-reminders. Okay? Ask some other questions, but Ricardo I’ll just let you finish.

Ricardo Hori:

Yeah, so the only last thing I wanted to say was that, look, we are looking to expand this to remove as much of manual work as possible from you. So to the point that someday perhaps just whenever you’re getting that purchase through an e-commerce store, we already have a flow to capture that direct debit automatically. And once that’s done, you know you’re going to get paid. You don’t think, you aren’t worried, you’re very confident that you’re going to get paid and all the records are going to be created, everything is going to be available in your ERP and you don’t need to worry about chasing or doing anything of that and like that.And we want to cover those scenarios. And that’s where we are heading. It’s to get the automation included at the very beginning of the process so that the majority, if not all of the process, is then automated. And that’s really exciting. That’s how we believe we are going to really get to not only reach zero days late, but to dramatically reduce the cost that they’re spending in collection, the time and effort and the stress of not getting paid and remove that from your life. So yeah, that’s it. I’ll just head back here real quick.

AJ Singh:

That’s what a roadmap is, right folks, it’s really about, yes, not so much improving the workflows and having heaps of extra steps in your collection process. Yes, that’s good, but if you really want to live our mission, which is zero days late, and you want to come on the journey with us, we have a good collection system. But where we want to actually really see, where we see the world going, is we want to get you paid zero days late. And the way to do it is this, in our opinion. So we’re investing a lot of our resources in R&D into making this better and we want your feedback. Can this work in your business? What are you missing?What do you need that you don’t have today? That’ll get prioritized in our roadmap faster around introducing more automation earlier in the process, meaning before the invoice even gets raised. That’s what we mean by earlier in the process. And then putting tools like auto collect, auto reconcile to make it more efficient and effective for you. That’s kind of hopefully the key takeaway from today. We have a lot more detailed steps in there that we can share if you want to go deeper, but I think we should leave the next few minutes for a couple more questions that we have.

Ricardo Hori:

Oh, sorry, let’s go for that Q&A.

AJ Singh:

Some of them are a little bit difficult, these questions, but I’ll try and answer them. One question’s come up is regarding the credit applications.

Is there any legislation that allows for it to make it easier to receive money when one refuses to pay?

So you are wondering if someone doesn’t pay, assuming you don’t have a direct debit authority on file, how do you force payment? I’m assuming that’s the question. PSR is a big thing. If you have a PSR registered against your sale or your invoice or the product, then that’s one way to definitely do that faster.

And it’s hard to force someone to pay. I guess you can go legal or debt collection through the system and that can help you get paid faster as well. But really perhaps director guarantees as well is the other one. Getting direct guarantees if you can get that would be really good. In the credit application process, some of our clients upload direct guarantees that they already have or you can do that through our system as well, right? Ricardo, anything that you want to add on that? I think that’s pretty much how I see that question.

Ricardo Hori:

Yeah, it’s a tough one. And yeah, it’s I guess part of the process of having a stricter onboarding process. It’s to try and help prevent scenarios like this, but if it does happen, it seems to me that the way AJ is describing where you’d have to go legal collection route.

AJ Singh:

Okay, Susan, again, thank you for your, you just sent two or three more questions, some good ones here. Susan, thank you again for all your support.

AJ Singh:

Asking lots of questions. Yeah, we love you Susan. We do. Yeah, so Susan said very, very exciting. And Susan is a user of auto collect now as well, I believe. And she said, so question is, will it eventually be an auto notification to a client if their credit card fails or is it about to get out of date? Okay, good question. Ricardo, do you want to answer it first?

Ricardo Hori:

Absolutely there will be a notification. So to be very precise, we currently do not have the notification, but that’s 100% in the roadmap to notify and give you alternatives on how to address that as well to proactively try to get a fresh credit card or a fresh authority before the time comes.

AJ Singh:

And Susan, one thing which don’t quote me, even though this is being recorded, when you tokenize a credit card, meaning we’ve stored the credit card details on file, you can still charge it even if it is past the expiry day because the actual number doesn’t change, it’s just the date changes. And there’s been some conversation around, yes, we do need to update the card date, but it doesn’t stop you from actually taking payment. And that’s something which we’ll come back to you and explain to you how all that works. But that’s currently something that’s quite doable based on some conversations we’ve had with our teams. So that’s that. But Ricardo, any timelines you can commit on that roadmap around?

Ricardo Hori:

But we’ll go back to you shortly, Susan, on this.

Ricardo Hori:

Yeah, I can take Rob ones. And by the way, those are great initials, Rob, RH, it’s the same as mine, Ricardo Hori.

So Rob’s question is,

How real time are the five shares and reconciliations to minimize scenarios where a customer are being chased for something already paid for or via another non ezyCollect means?

So there are two scenarios there. So if it’s been outside of ezyCollect, that’s a configuration that needs to be done through the sync process. So how often your file syncs so we can receive the data that payment has occurred/ but you have some options like manually creating a payment promise within the system so that client is not chased.

So I can quickly show you how that works. If you go into invoices, so let’s say here, you want to add a promise. And if you do, that means that customer will not be chased. Now, if it is through ezyCollect where you get the auto reconciliation process, now the auto reconciliation process would generally happen within a couple of minutes, but even if that’s the case, we already mark the payment as completed, right? So you can see here that ezyCollect identifies the payments either through collect now, auto collect, or through our payments portal. We already marked the invoice as paid. So it will not be chased regardless of it being reconciled or not on your ERP.

AJ Singh:

So Rob, just to, I guess to kind of summarize that, payments will get reconciled within minutes, right?

Ricardo Hori:

Yes.

AJ Singh:

And so the issue about if it’s paid through ezyCollect means, if it’s coming outside ezyCollect means, it’s how often you sync your ERP with ezyCollect. If you sync your file once a day, then the risk is one day, or if you sync it every 20 minutes, then the risk is every 20 minutes. But the thing is, we don’t send communications to your customers every two minutes. It’s sent only once a day anyway. So as long as your sync happens before we send out the communications, you are covered by that scenario. And there’s a question here for you from Kevin, Ricardo.

AJ Singh:

So Rob, just to, I guess to kind of summarize that, payments will get reconciled within minutes, right?

Ricardo Hori:

Yes.

AJ Singh:

Ricardo Hori:

Yeah, I saw that Kevin, and again, while I’m not committing to any timelines, we have been working on new components for the tables. And of course, configuration of columns is part of that project, but this is still in the works and it will be rolled out slowly to all the different tables that we have in the project.

AJ Singh:

Kevin’s question though, just in case, was when will columns on the screens be selectable? That was the question. Just in case.

Ricardo Hori:

Oh, sorry. I keep forgetting to read the questions. See, I’m not very, I need more practice at this. Okay. So I’ll read a question then.

Fiona is asking,

while we have the authority to collect funds, if no funds are in the account or on credit cards, how many times will the auto collect try to collect the payment before the payment is the false folded and who incurs the fees?

Okay. All right. So the first thing is that we will not mark a retry for the auto collect at this point. It depends on which provider that you’re using right now.

Ricardo Hori:

There’s a little bit more detail on this. And what happens is that if the auto collect does not happen successfully, then the chasing process will resume. But in terms of what is going to happen in the future, of course we’ll allow you to configure what do you believe a reasonable amount of reprise is. Okay? And within the ezyCollect payments facility, there is a fee for a failed payment. I believe it’s 30 cents per failed transaction at this point. I’d have to confirm the exact which is incurred by the client. In this case, it would be by you, but again, so no reprise, but we will be able to configure the retrial in the future. And then, there is a 30 cents fee per failed transaction.

AJ Singh:

And Fiona, if you do want retry today, right, it’s probably a manual setting we could do through our third party provider to actually do retries on. But if you want it all in one place, that’s what Ricardo was saying, that’s coming in the roadmap. And it’s a little bit soon because we’re putting a lot of effort in this space. This is where 40% of the business is focused on, if not more. 50%. So that’s where you’ll see a lot of changes every week, every couple weeks things will be changing here.

AJ Singh:

We’re almost out of time here and there’s a couple of questions that we probably may have missed. I’m sorry if we have, we’ll go through the questions later on and we’ll get back to the folks that asked the questions. So there’s one I should address really quickly from Helen regarding director guarantees. If signed digitally, does it stand in court? So I’ll get some, I can’t give you advice on that right now as I’ll have you check with our lawyers, Helen.

And so just Diane, if you can just make a note of that one and we’ll get back to you, Helen, on that particular thing so I don’t give you the wrong information. But yeah, look, that’s the update. It’s not a big fancy presentation, it was just more of a informal chat. Hopefully you guys got a lot from today. My and Ricardo’s email is on screen. Please reach out directly if you’d like to get started on this yourself or if you have any feedback for us. I know that we get lots of feedback from customers and we are trying our best to do things quickly. But thank you for your support, everyone. And Ricardo, any last words from your end?

Ricardo Hori:

Yeah, no, thank you for joining us today. We’re really excited about this roadmap in this journey we’re going into. And if you’re interested, just email me, AJ, customer success. We’ll really be very more than happy to help you get set up and get those payments happening while you are asleep or while you’re resting, and with all the reconciliation, everything that comes with it. So yeah, thanks for joining and I hope everyone has a great day ahead.

AJ Singh:

Thank you. Yep. Bye bye.

Ricardo Hori:

All right, see you guys.