Melissa & Doug

The Challenge

Melissa and Doug is an American manufacturer and purveyor of children’s toys that makes wooden puzzles, arts and crafts products, plush toys and other educational toys. They are rapidly expanding with a growing global customer base.

Their business credit process was heavily dependent on shipping and insuring the receivables, with a shorter evaluation of the underlying credit risk. As the firm grew in scale, their CFO and Controller realized it was time to establish a more disciplined process so that their internal teams and insurance company had quick access to significantly more information ahead of shipment. They needed a solution to help reduce write-offs and the high cost of trade insurance both in premiums and claims, where there is a lack of information.

The Solution

Melissa and Doug partnered with Billtrust and together, they came up with a plan to reduce their write-offs and the high cost of trade insurance through the use of a smart online credit app process. They spent time with Melissa & Doug’s senior sales and finance teams to baseline their end-to-end credit and collections process, made recommendations for change and then rapidly configured a complete solution, including automated feeds of valuable business credit information to their insurer.

The Results

They can now issue online credit applications with a click of a button, automate bank and trade references, all while integrating with Billtrust’s extensive credit bureau data. Their credit team can now dig through the application portal for details like public filings, machine-learned scores, calculated credit lines and overall customer activity. With many of their consumer product manufacturers involved in the Billtrust trade network system, they can also validate experiences on common customers with live peer updates and know that Billtrust is monitoring their customer portfolios for risk alerts.