With a goal to grow credit applications by 2,000 in one year, finance leaders at 84 Lumber knew they needed a credit application automation solution to help them reach their goal without hiring more people to handle the increased volume. They leveraged Billtrust’s electronic credit application tool to eliminate manual inefficiencies. The result? The company gained efficiency, enabling six credit managers to handle 8,000 applications instead of just 5,000. At the same time, they cut their credit card processing fees in half. Thanks to Billtrust, the Director of Credit, Brian Page, has empowered scalable growth. Hear his story.
“Our initiative is to grow credit apps by 2000 this year, but our processes in place would not allow that to happen. With six credit managers on staff, I would have to hire two more credit managers just to handle the increase in paper applications.”
Brian Page, Director of Credit, 84 Lumber
Finance leaders realized that credit and collections automation technologies could help. That’s when Billtrust performed a consultative workshop with 84 Lumber’s collections, credit, and cash application teams. The company was already operating on Billtrust’s portal, and once the team saw how quickly they could evaluate and approve applications, they were ready to implement. Page and his team could visualize how they would gain productivity and give their team more time to do their job more efficiently.
“Using Billtrust’s electronic tool, we can grow and keep just the same amount of credit managers, because it reduces all the missing information that we would have with the paper applications. Today, we can do 8,000 credit apps with six credit managers instead of 5,000-6,000 credit apps with the same number of credit managers. It’s been inspirational for us.”
The team also implemented credit card surcharging practices using the Billtrust platform. Now that they are able to recover their credit card acceptance costs, the company is recognizing significant gains through cost avoidance.
“At one time, we were doing $30-35 million in credit card processing fees, and those have been reduced in half.”
Page and other finance leaders recognize the value of layering an AR automation platform on top of their ERP system – rather than using their own IT team to customize their ERP system with specialized features for AR operations.
“We tried to do some things internally, but it just didn’t work out. If we home-grow a solution, it doesn’t improve unless we see where those improvements need to be made and we ask for them. Billtrust, however, is always improving their platform. Look at their roadmap. With Billtrust, everything’s always looked at and always moving further down the road. That’s a big, big plus for us.”
Brian Page, Director of Credit, 84 Lumber
Ready to begin your AR transformation? Talk to an expert.
