At a glance
With Chaser, innovative bookkeepers Fresh Financials have:
- Streamlined their outsourced credit control offering, allowing them to deliver the same great results in just five minutes, compared to two hours previously
- Transformed clients’ businesses, including highlights such as: 26 invoices paid for one client in the first hour of using Chaser, and turning one client’s customer base from 90% late payers to 90% early or on-time payers
- Been able to offer world-class outsourced credit control for just £100 per month
Meet Emma Fox
Emma is the Founder & MD at Fresh Financials, a UK-based bookkeeper and winner of Xero’s Bookkeeping Partner of the Year 2016. Previously a self-employed bookkeeper for 14 years, Emma breathed Fresh Financials into life in 2013. Her mission - helping business owners understand their financial story, and try and have fun doing so!
Powered by Xero, Fresh Financials’ five-person team offers a range of top-tier accounting and bookkeeping services to more than 100 satisfied clients. And “service” is definitely the operating word here. Emma’s team work on each of their clients’ businesses every single day, and ensure they catch up with them at least once per week. This has helped cement Fresh Financials as an integral part of its clients’ own teams.
I spoke to Emma about her journey with Chaser and learned how it’s changed the game for Fresh Financials’ client offering.
Traditional credit control’s fatal flaw
“Numbers shouldn’t be this much fun!” is Emma’s personal motto. But turn back the clock to 2013 and you’d be hard-pressed to get her to say it whenever she conducted credit control for a client.
“Credit control was a task. A real task. It was painful.”
Every week, Emma and her team would each see two hours sunk in emailing and phoning clients’ customers to chase payment. But it wasn’t just the sheer volume of manual work that was an issue. Maintaining an audit trail was next to impossible. The team began with an email-based approach. Forwards and CCs of email chasers flew back and forth amongst the team in a desperate and messy attempt to keep single email threads for each invoice.
Shifting to a shared, cloud-based spreadsheet improved data cleanliness and access, however the requirement of manually updating it was still prone to human error.
“One of the most frustrating issues was when a client’s customer would respond to them instead of me, after chasing. That could easily leave us in the dark on details like expected payment dates, which meant chasing the customer again when we shouldn’t have. Not only is it embarrassing, it hurts the reputation of my business.”
Consistency, or lack thereof. That’s what Emma realised was the fatal flaw in credit control at the time - delivering high-quality credit control consistently.
Upsetting the apple cart
Xerocon London, 2013. Emma wandered the show floor, surrounded by booths and stalls from various app partners. She recalls being approached by a friendly-looking guy asking her for her thoughts on an app. A credit control app.
“As the conversation went on, it struck me - this was it. This was exactly what credit control needed.”
The app was going to remove the need for so much manual chasing work, automatically maintain clean audit trails, and ensure a consistent approach to invoice chasing. The app was Chaser. The man was David Tuck. And in less than two months Emma went on to become an official beta tester of the app that would change credit control for her forever.
After a successful trial internally at Fresh Financials, Emma was convinced of Chaser’s value and ready to offer its use on her clients’ behalf. But there were no takers.
“It was difficult to initially convince clients we should use Chaser for their credit control. I remember the first clients I thought it would be perfect for. One was so used to having their credit control conducted via phone calls that they thought even the change to email would completely upset the apple cart.”
The proof point
Emma didn’t give up. Thanks to the excellent relationships she’d formed, she convinced several clients to come onboard. It wasn’t long before she got the proof point of a lifetime with one client - AdventureYogi. Within an hour of their first chaser being sent out, they got 26 invoices paid.
“They were overjoyed. And so was I! That was the perfect proof point to show other clients to convince them of Chaser’s value.”
Emma continued on about another memorable client she brought onto Chaser. Pearce Marketing Consultants, a digital marketing agency. Before implementing Chaser, over 90% of Pearce’s customers were paying late, requiring Emma to send 20-30 manual chasers every week. These days almost 90% of Pearce’s clients are paying on time or even early, with Emma using Chaser to send the (only) 1-2 automatic chasers needed per week.
World-class credit control at a competitive cost
With these early successes, Emma had no problem spreading Chaser across her client base. With Chaser, Fresh Financials is empowered to consistently deliver world-class credit control at a drastically reduced time and resource cost compared to traditional methods.
Fresh Financials would go on to win the award for Bookkeeping Partner of the Year at Xerocon 2016 (Photo source: Xero)
What previously cost Emma and her team two hours each every week has dropped to five minutes with Chaser (a 96% reduction!), allowing her to provide clients amazing credit control for just £100 per month. This enables Emma to offer a high-value service, at a competitive price point, to a large number of clients. And it certainly shows in customer testimonials:
“Working with Fresh Financials has been a total dream. They have helped to revolutionise the way we run our business - so much more than just bookkeeping. They are now an invaluable member of our team!”
- Hayley Bayes, Ram Inn
The lasting effect
Toward the end of our chat, I asked Emma her thoughts on the credit control space, having been with Chaser since the beginning.
“It’s completely transformed. Chaser really changed the space. Several other apps have appeared in the market since Chaser - even Xero has its own invoice reminders. For us, though, Chaser is the one with the features we need. And at a great price, and with a great team supporting it, why would we ever change?”
Are you an accountant or bookkeeper we're not working with yet? We'd love to speak to you about how Chaser can add value to your clients, bring your firm additional revenue, and solidify client relationships. Email us at partner@chaserhq.com today.
Header image modified from photo courtesy of rawpixel via Unsplash.
