How Goudici reduced time spent on customer reminders with structured scenarios

Goudici provides corporate meal delivery services in Nantes, Saint-Nazaire and surrounding areas. The company chose LeanPay to better structure its customer reminders and significantly reduce late payments.

On a daily basis, Angie Bouillard, in charge of customer relations and invoicing, and Sandie Achard, responsible for accounting and administration, are the main LeanPay users. They share how invoice management worked before LeanPay and what changed in their daily routines.

Before LeanPay

100% manual customer reminders

Invoice PDFs manually attached to emails

Significant time spent: full afternoons with two people, sometimes supported by sales staff

A time consuming Excel file updated manually

With LeanPay

Simple validation of pre prepared reminders

Invoice PDFs automatically attached to emails

Major time savings: one person handles reminders in less than 30 minutes per day

A simple, user friendly solution

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Invoicing software not designed for B2B and Excel based tracking

Sandie Achard explains their previous setup: “We use Prestashop for invoicing. Unfortunately, it is not very well suited to a B2B activity.”

Orders come through the website, by email or by phone. When placed by phone, Angie Bouillard manually enters them into Prestashop.

“When the sale is made online, the customer has two options: either pay online by bank card, or pay on delivery when the invoice is presented,” explains Angie Bouillard. As a result, some orders do not need any follow up. “But that’s far from the most common case. In B2B, companies negotiate payment terms and are used to making grouped bank transfers at the same time. So in reality, very few pay by card.”

Once an order status changes to “delivered”, Prestashop automatically emails the invoice. However, the person placing the order is rarely the one responsible for payment. In many cases, invoices must be uploaded to a platform or forwarded to the accounting department.

“In those cases, I manually extract the invoice and resend it to the right person,” explains Angie Bouillard.

Before LeanPay, invoice tracking was handled in Excel.

“We exported data from Prestashop and reworked it in Excel to track payments. We added payment terms and due dates. We calculated delays, but not DSO,” recalls Sandie Achard.

Goudici applies various payment terms: 15 days (for customers who did not specify any payment terms), 30 days, 45 days or 60 days.

The Excel process involved double work:

• Daily payment tracking
  Sandie Achard describes her routine: “Every day, I logged into our bank account to see all the payments received. Then, in the Excel file, I removed all the paid invoices. And I added the new invoices that were still outstanding.”

• Customer reminders
  They had to find the order in Prestashop, locate the matching invoice and download it as a PDF. Then they had to draft the reminder email and manually attach the invoice PDF. “When it came to reminders, we only dealt with them when we had time. It was far from a daily follow up. That led to more significant late payments. And we were spending a huge amount of time on low value invoices, around 20 € to 50 €.”

“In the end, we were losing more money than anything else,” continues Sandie Achard.

In total, they manually tracked around 400 invoices per month. They had to do a lot of manual handling, which made the tracking extremely time consuming.

The idea of using an accounts receivable software came fairly quickly, especially as turnover was also increasing. Manual management was no longer manageable. Angie Bouillard, who had previously worked in collections and used dedicated software, also supported the idea. She clearly understood the benefit for the company: “Even if it costs money, it’s a huge time saving and, ultimately, a financial gain.”

“When you send reminders every day versus once a month, cash flow is not the same at the end of the month,” concludes Angie Bouillard.

Together with Alexandre Billard, co managing director of Goudici, they attended a LeanPay demo. The software appealed immediately and the conversation with Socrate Tellier, CEO and co founder of LeanPay, went very smoothly. They did not compare LeanPay with other providers.

“I didn’t know debt collection software like Angie did, but LeanPay immediately felt very user friendly, simple and effective,” remembers Sandie Achard.

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Multi step reminder plans tailored to customers

To integrate Goudici invoices into LeanPay, the method chosen was automatic reading of PDF invoices. For payments, a bank synchronisation is used to retrieve them every day.

“To get started, we imported all invoices issued from 1 February 2022 onwards, as the earlier ones were still managed in our Excel file,” specifies Sandie Achard. “The integration was very fast: in barely a week, it was done!”

The process is now well structured:

“Every evening, I send all the day’s invoices to the email address dedicated to us at LeanPay. The next day, the integration is already done and, five days later, the invoices appear for our level 1 reminder,” explains Angie Bouillard.

As for Sandie Achard, around every ten days she sends LeanPay the information about new billing contacts to import. “Socrate gave me a template for that. I export from Prestashop and simply fill in his file.”

They created three different reminder workflows:

• A default plan for customers who must pay within 15 days
• A plan for customers with 30 day payment terms
• A plan for customers with payment terms of 45 to 60 days

For each reminder scenario, the first action is an email titled “Have you received our invoice?”. It automatically includes the PDF invoice as an attachment and is sent five days after delivery, regardless of the customer’s due date.

“We realised that many invoices arriving in the inbox of the person who placed the order (often someone at reception) were not necessarily forwarded to the accounting department. Now we get far fewer cases of invoices reported as not received,” notes Sandie Achard.

All their reminder plans include six levels, spaced ten days apart. The first three overdue levels correspond to reminders sent by email. Levels four and five are phone reminders.

“For level 6, at 60 days overdue, we planned to send a registered letter. But in reality, we have never gone that far. We prefer a softer approach by making a phone call. So we use the call script feature a lot,” indicates Sandie Achard.

“When I handle the reminders to send, I first filter by communication channel. That way, I deal with emails first and keep all calls for a second stage,” adds Angie Bouillard.

They both appreciate LeanPay’s collaborative management, as Angie Bouillard highlights: “The two of us both log all customer feedback. It is important that we have the same level of information to make the work easier.”

And she concludes:

“It’s wonderful compared to what we had before!”

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A 20 day DSO and major time savings

Sandie Achard and Angie Bouillard summarise the impact of LeanPay on Goudici’s activity and their day to day work.

• Their outstanding amount has dropped significantly. “Before, we had an average outstanding amount of more than 30 days. Now it is more around 20 days,” analyses Sandie Achard.
• The biggest improvement for them is the daily time saving. Sandie Achard now spends three minutes a day on bank reconciliations. Angie Bouillard, who takes over customer reminders, logs into LeanPay every day for just over 30 minutes. This is a radical change compared with the time spent when everything was managed in Excel.
  “Sometimes we spent entire afternoons on payment reminders. We split the task because it took so long. It even happened that we asked our colleagues in sales to help us,” remembers Angie Bouillard.

• “LeanPay makes my life much easier for bank reconciliations in accounting. I open Cegid and LeanPay at the same time. When I want to find a reconciliation, meaning which amount pays which invoice, it’s very easy to find with LeanPay. It’s wonderful!” adds Sandie Achard.
• On DSO, the metric is now calculated automatically in LeanPay. “Our DSO is 20 days. Between customers who pay on 15 day terms and those who pay on 30, 45 or 60 days, we consider a DSO of 20 days to be really good,” explains Sandie Achard.

“That means what is sold at the beginning of the month arrives as cash at the end of the month. Now, we are less impacted, or even no longer impacted at all, by late payments.”

To close, Sandie Achard talks about the relationship with LeanPay: “Our requests are followed up very well. We mentioned certain points at the beginning with Socrate. They were all picked up months later by Mythridate Dubuis, Customer Success Manager at LeanPay. I really appreciate that.”