Finance

Collect direct debit payments

You may have clients who prefer to pay you by Direct Debit or ACH. That doesn’t mean your bank is going to make it easy to collect them. They’re not called bankers for nothing.

Wouldn’t it be better if you could accept direct debits without having to make an appointment to meet a grey suit? Well, to ease direct debit distress, we integrated GoCardless with w3p. There’s no monthly fee on their basic plan – members pay per transaction, usually lower than card fees.

To start charging clients, you need to get a dd mandate. You’ve probably filled out a paper one yourself. GoCardless does it online. In w3p, teams find the customer and click to request a mandate. We email a secure link. When the client fills it in, we let them know and the mandate is ready to use.

Direct Debit individual subscriptions, or collect a whole week’s invoice. Successful payments are matched automatically to invoices and paid into the studio’s bank account. We tell them about naughty bouncers, as well as nudging clients to make an alternative payment. Bad bouncer, bad.

Sending invoices in your sleep

“I like doing all my invoicing on a Sunday morning”.

Shouldn’t you be watching the Hollyoaks omnibus instead? Or taking the dog for a walk? Seriously, friends don’t let friends spend their weekends typing out invoices.

We all enjoy the buzz you get from ringing up sales. But w3p does it faster. And what if w3p enjoys the buzz too? You didn’t think about that did you? No, you only think about yourself.

Nettl studios have three invoicing options. Set the rules for all customers, or configure one-by-one. If studios prefer to use their accounts package instead, invoices off and we won’t send them. Or, single invoices are sent as each job is despatched. Finally, bigger clients prefer consolidated invoices – we send one weekly invoice, covering everything shipped last week.

Studios set payment terms and credit limits for each customer and w3p emails invoices automatically.

It even pops on a payment due date, studio bank details, payment reference and a link to pay online. Walkies!

Nudge and chase overdue invoices

“Thank you, pay me” is a slightly politer version of the infamous Joe Pesci line from Goodfellas.

I mean, it’s only fair that people pay us all for work we do. Most businesses have to deal with slow payers. And worse, non-payers. Some sluggish companies only pay their bills the second or third time they’re nagged.

That’s why w3p does some chasing on behalf of Nettl studios. It emails monthly PDF statements to clients. Each itemises invoices outstanding and payments made.

Remember, teams can set different payment terms for each client. Some might be on cash terms. Others will want 30 days, end of month. You might have local authorities or institutions asking for 60 or even 90 days. Each invoice is tagged with a due date. If any are overdue, or a client has breached your credit limit, w3p sends a weekly nudge, with a link to pay online.

It might not replace your fiercest credit controller, but at least it means they can focus their efforts on the true badfellas.

Connect with an accounts package

There are two types of people in this world. There’s those who diligently enter invoices, record payments and match them off every week. And then there’s those who, every

April, drop off a carrier bag full of receipts and invoices with their bookkeeper. Feeling guilty and sheepishly leaving the room backwards.

Look. Let’s be clear. We’ve got nothing against bookkeepers, per se. We’re sure they’re very fine people. Kind to animals. Pillars of the community. All that stuff. It’s just that w3p does their job a bit better and a bit faster. It’s funny because it’s true.

w3p plays nice with Xero, one of the world’s top cloud-based accounting systems. (Quickbooks integration is also coming summer 2020.) Manually export a transaction file from w3p each day or week and import it to Xero.

Or better still, set-up Auto Export and forget. Studios can connect their Xero account and we’ll upload customers, sales invoices, credit notes and payment receipts. We also import purchase invoices from Nettl. Xero means zero admin.

Made for teams

“I’m not saying it’s your fault, I’m just blaming you.”

Mistakes happen. People are only human. We have to live with that (until computers reach sentience, mwah-haha). As leaders, it’s how we learn from errors and use them to improve things. To identify knowledge gaps and use as coaching opportunities.

We’ve built w3p for teams. Each team member gets their own user account and login. A Nettl subscription covers a whole team – we don’t charge per-user. Despite that, some studios share a single user account. We realise that sharing’s caring. But they’re missing the benefits of giving people individual responsibility.

Every important action is logged. Teams can see who entered each order, who changed the quantity and when. The person who checked files. Who sent a proof. Who charged a credit card. It’s all there. Logged in a full audit trail.

Team leaders can see who’s doing what. Who’s running which machine. Who’s sold the most. Who’s got tasks assigned. Who’s got too much to do. And who’s been skiving.

Analyse profit and margin

“Here’s to the angry data. The problem data. The data that brings joy. And the data craziest enough to change things.”

What’s a sociodatapath? It’s someone who looks at data, without feeling emotion. They scan spreadsheets, row by row. And then, nothing. They can’t muster any feelings, because the data is hiding insights from them. It’s just numb, numbers.

We hear about big data and data warehousing. Maybe you think that’s only for big tech companies. Truth is, w3p collects billions of data points. It sorts and summarises them into different reports, for different purposes. Things like product mix, job-by-job margin, profit-by-customer and quality costs, all help highlight where performance can be improved.

And there’s Stretch Hurt KPIs. Although it sounds like a nasty yoga class, it’s actually useful analysis of value-added revenue (stretch), profit leakage, discounts and margin misses (hurt).

Studios use insight from transactions to cause reactions. To provoke further action. Now relax. Breathe.