Cappuccino Chat - Episode8 - Payment Portal

I welcome back to cappuccino chat today I'm talking with Ryan at Kinect booster now if you are already a client of ours who are familiar with this product we are sending out our notices and our payment gateway provider if you will so you can now pay all your bills with us online so those of you familiar with that are already familiar with his product so Ryan tell me a little bit about how connect Booster came to be and why you created it yeah great question so I owned a service based business in addition to the software business I'm in the point-of-sale business now I originally grew up in the payment processing space okay so we were used to being paid on an automated basis and we never dealt with aging AR we're ill-prepared to run a service based business and all of a sudden we had aging AR and people weren't paying us for implementations of point-of-sale and the monthly service contracts and we were looking for things that integrated to our counting package as you bring in payments obviously you know as a business owner prior to using us you had to always match up those payments to accounting and it's a lot of work and so not only were we looking for a way to automate cash would eliminate eliminate work it inside of bringing that money inside of our business and so in seeking out tools that integrated to the business systems that we use we couldn't find them we were in the payments processing space and we couldn't find it to us so we started building it and once we built it it started out a meeting our cash flow once it started automating our cash flow I said boy there's a lot of other service based businesses that could probably benefit from this not only from bringing cash in on time yes but then also eliminating the work involved in bringing dollars inside of your businesses so those automations to accounting and that was the birth of the product connect booster and then how how we got that in front of individuals like you yes base business that need helping yeah yeah it mean your cash flow gets affected we all know so may have a big project or you get something going takes a lot of your cash are you well if it then takes we all say net 30 right everybody isn't that 30 but in the old days it more like net 120 it's one of those things so and we all understand that but if we can get that cash flow and reuse it within our business kind of like our taxes yes all right Uncle Sam if you will if we don't have to owe Uncle Sam anything Sam doesn't notice that's the perfect world exactly so we want to get as close to those can where the payment gateway so one thing that comes up though when we're dealing with all this information and the hackers of today and everything that's going on is its security yes and that compliance and we've all dealt with those weird awkward PCI compliance your bank wants to know what you're doing in the checklists and stuff like that's okay so how do you address that and help help your clients with that well it's all about having access to the data but not holding the data and so as a technology provider what we do is we make it really easy for our clients and our partners to have access to that data through our tool but it's not living in your network it's not living in the clients Network you know they have access to it but it's secure so all that data is being held off side in a PCI compliant environment and so really the software for example and when you enter a payment information into their into their system they don't they don't have access to that payment information directly inside of the software yeah we don't see anything taken correct right and though there's there's nothing that lives there so god forbid the product would ever have a breach less payment information is not a worry it's held inside of a PCI compliant environment lockdown and so that's one important thing you know I run into all kinds of scenarios so not only do we work with other IT service providers but we work with service based businesses of all kinds and we see people that have a master spreadsheet with credit card numbers right because they have some type of a recurring Ville or they have the filing cabinet right and there are ways and technologies out there that can help remove you from the liability while still having easy access to do business with your clients and that's one of the things that provide yeah I was just talking with another MSP here at the convention and he recently deployed a tool and the tool went out and looked at some of the desktops on this network for this client right and they found it found text files plain text text file containing credit card information in plain text so if that computer was breach god forbid you know that kind of information that yes that would be out there and you know one of the things that it makes it really simple is you don't have to learn a new tool all right so everybody knows QuickBooks right so not having that double entry again you put your invoice in in QuickBooks like you normally do your client gets notified they go to a portal they pay it exact your system then puts it back in too quick yeah and everyone's happy you're not hiring more people you're actually kind of taking some of those man-hours to let that person that's probably wearing two three four or five hats right within the company to kind of get back to having a little bit of extra time maybe that's exactly it I always say we're not in the business of replacing people at the same time there are typically things inside of the business that have greater value where if you take the busy work out they can be adding more value to your business or if you're in a growth phase let's say 20 30 40 percent growth what does that look like after a 40 percent growth here if you're still dealing with these same problems well now you're talking about needing to hire another person yeah and I mean humans are training them up there and so you know implementing automation it's not always about you know eliminating individuals in your workspace it's about making their time the most effective and they can add more value to your business heck they might be getting a raise because they're adding more value to your business right so I mean that's a completely flip side of the conversation that often people walk down that road of automation is replacing no we're just we're doing more with less and and we're we're being good stewards of what we have as business owners exactly and in today's world too we're often familiar with you know you can pay all sorts of bills online right up to your gas bill you're like yes you login you pay it so just getting your business at that level can severely boost productivity and stuff so I mean it's made a big difference in our company with the time spent on following up on hey did you receive that aging did you receive that invoice yeah you don't have to it can be set up to automate some of those things again yeah taking that time you're giving that time back to that employee to concentrate on those more things that your business is all about in the service industry that's a great point because you know let alone you know payments coming in and being honor me you're making it easy for clients to to give you money we all know it's hard enough to get in the door you know and close the sale it shouldn't be hard to bring in the money out to the back that's a that's a mantra but notifications if things do go past you or you have projects or product that has net terms that needs to go out that might fall well outside of an automated recurring tight bill right well let's stop being a collection agency let's stop being a bank there are automations in place in software ours or or others that can help notify clients of things go past you notify them maybe if they have an upcoming payment and I think what that does not only helps reduce aging AR inside of your business it makes you look more professional right but don't think of the big businesses out there mm-hmm they have 24/7 365 access to the information that that people want and a lot of times service based businesses in the small to medium-sized business space they can serve that up manually but often times it's during business hours right yeah so through software your end client can receive this 24/7 365 and and and you're right that is the trend people are coming to expect that yes from service based businesses of all kinds and so and this doesn't have to be an expensive thing correct you know there there are tools out there we're certainly one of them where it can be a low managed monthly fee you don't have to have this large capital yeah real and really easy to integrate I mean it wasn't a big issue so again is something to look into get your service industry back up get cash flow back back under control that's really what it's all about cash is king cash is king it's like blood in our veins it is the blood so this is cappuccino chat so I've got to ask we're at the convention so coffee again and not the best but what's your favorite coffee like I am a cold press guy cold so every morning I I literally will drive five miles for done brothers cold pressed coffee I get it in growlers okay and it's almost like an espresso so water warmed up porn the cold press little cream I'm good for for at least 20 minutes my caffeine feed so you're talking I haven't espresso machine at the office that my lovely wife got for me and I'm a three to four cup or a day so I'm pretty good so thank you very much yeah everyone we'll see you next time you