Leadventure: Automating AR with Paystand for Sustained Growth

Leadventure is a SaaS website provider of digital marketing services for dealerships, OEMs, and resellers across 13 verticals, operating multiple subsidiaries that provide solutions to drive leads and in-store sales. With over 28,000 clients and services that range from website management to marketing tools and eCatalogs, LeadVenture has formed relationships with some of the largest manufacturers in the industry.

As the company continued to grow with multiple acquisitions, standardizing processes and systems across multiple businesses became difficult. The volume of transactions grew, along with manual labor and data scattered across different platforms. Collections and reconciliation processes became an increasingly challenging, time-consuming, and inaccurate endeavor. So, LeadVenture turned to Paystand and NetSuite to automate their payment process and manage their financial data in one place.

Challenge: Unify payment data, collections, and reconciliation processes

Jonathan Kuczer, Leadventure's Corporate Controller, started their AR automation process after a period of acquisitions. Initially, the company decided to leave their newly acquired companies' systems operating individually, including maintaining standalone ERPs. But multiple systems complicated reporting processes. In practice, multiple systems meant multiple data and reports.

"We wanted to consolidate reporting and take our current 3-week close process down to 6 days, or even 5. Even when we did the analysis [on month-end close data], it was hard because you found something, then you don't know how to dig in” said Jonathan Kuczer, referring to the tangled data across multiple ERPs. “We wanted reliable, fast ways to pull reporting throughout the month for real-time decision making, instead of waiting for 3 weeks."

Even though there were multiple payment tools and ERPs in place to manage legacy, paper-based payments methods, as Jonathan noted, these weren't providing enough benefit to solve bigger issues LeadVenture faced. In particular:

• The month-end close processes took too long to run.
• The individual ERPs did not provide real-time visibility.
• Payment information took half a day to receive.
• Payments took too long to reconcile, causing double-billing efforts on invoices that had already been paid, creating friction with customers.
• Internal applications took 4-5 days to process payments, often in batches per payment method one at a time.
• Costs of maintenance were high.

Leadventure saw this clearly with one of their subsidiaries, who used two apps to run payments and collections, causing payments to be made from outside the systems.

Resolving these problems started with implementing an ERP that could cover every subsidiary and acquisition. Leadventure has about 15 people in their billing team handling over 20,000 customers with an average ticket of $400-500. They chose NetSuite as their ERP solution for their fast processing, cloud agility and stability, and better reporting.

Implementing NetSuite requires a level of sophistication, and LeadVenture reached out to Ron Bester, CEO of CloudConnect Consulting, to help implement the solution. Some of the biggest challenges that Leadventure took on during this process were correct data migration and refining invoicing workflows while keeping independence between their subsidiaries from a customer perspective. Notably, the needed to solve these issues:

• A high volume of transactions with an average ticket of $400-$500 ticket at the lowest processing cost.
• Eliminating the need for +5 ERP systems and +2 card and payment processors.
• Allowing their team to automate collection processes for thousands of customers.
• Get reliable and fast ways to pull accurate reporting throughout the month.

"Leadventure had recently implemented NetSuite and had two different credit card processors that they were using with their legacy system, neither of which were integrated with NetSuite. They also have a very high volume of transactions, so the amount of manual effort on collections and reconciliation was massive." - Ron Bester, CloudConnect Consulting, CEO (NetSuite Solution Provider / Integrator).

Solution: AR automation in one place

Once the financial processes were carried out in NetSuite, NetSuite Credit Card Processing helped Leadventure digitize the entire payment lifecycle by automatically applying payments and reconciling deposits, reducing workload and time, and improving accuracy. The LeadVenture finance team will no longer have to guess which transactions match deposits and will now be able to seamlessly tie payments to invoices. This is the benefit of automated reconciliation with Paystand and our NetSuite integration.

"Paystand not only automated their payment data flow and reconciliation, it allowed the LeadVenture team to automate payment processing/billing without leaving NetSuite." - Ron Bester, CloudConnect Consulting, CEO (NetSuite Solution Provider / Integrator).

Once their workflows are set in place, Leadventure is expecting to reduce their DSO (from the inherited poor DSO), reduce payment fees, and see better results by:

• Using the Pay Now button feature in automated invoices to reduce late payments.
• Using the auto reconciliation feature for reducing hours of manual labor.
• Cleaning up data from other ERPs.
• Leveraging Paystand's zero-fee banking network for processing payments.
• Eliminating manual process, and bringing down the number of "great than 90 days" late payments.
• Reducing credit card fees that currently cost them millions of dollars per year.

We'll continue to cover how Paystand improves Leadventure's accounting and finance processes during 2021, being a key factor in reaching their financial goals this year and beyond.

Need to automate your AR processes?

Would you like to save countless hours in manual labor while speeding up your AR process? Paystand makes it fast and easy to get started. Schedule a free demo with one of our payment experts or call us at 1-800-708-6413.