For years, most of our attention went to the parts of the business our clients could see directly.
How fast do we respond to a critical issue? How do we hold our own team accountable? How do we make sure clients get help first, even when it costs us the account short term?
Those questions mattered, and we built a strong reputation around answering them well.
But there was another question we hadn’t asked closely enough: what happens when accounts receivable doesn’t meet the same standard as everything else?
That question is what eventually led us to Alternative Payments.
At a Glance
- Accounts receivable was the last operational area we brought up to our own standard, and the gap was bigger than we realized.
- Inconsistent invoicing meant some clients got overdue notices six months after a balance had built up.
- Alternative Payments gave us same-day invoice payability, trackable and incentivizable auto pay, and payment reporting we can trust.
- A rocky syncing-tool migration tested the partnership early, and the response built more trust than a smooth rollout would have.
- Weekly reconciliation and QuickBooks book-closing both sped up meaningfully once the new system was in place.
Why Accounts Receivable Was the Last Thing We Fixed
When our CEO Ben Tiggelaar took over the business three years ago, he inherited a company with a strong service culture and a team that executed at a high level across operations, client support, and sales. Accounts receivable was the exception. It was the last area we got to, and by the time we looked closely at it, the gap was significant. There was no consistency in how invoices went out and no structured process for following up when clients fell behind.
Overdue notices were going out six months after a balance had accumulated, and clients who hadn’t received consistent billing were suddenly told they owed money for a period they’d long since moved past.
“You’d get inconsistent emails to clients saying you’re behind, and they’d be like, ‘This was six months ago. How can you let us know that we owed this month to month?’ It was very frustrating for both our accounting team and our clients.”
— Jason Richardson, VP of Operations
What Inconsistent AR Cost Us
That gap raised a few questions we had to be able to answer:
Could we make confident growth and headcount decisions from this data? Could we trust the numbers in front of us, or were we second-guessing them? Was our team spending its time on
clients, or chasing payments?
The answer to all three used to be no. When cash isn’t coming in reliably, the decisions available to leadership change, from growth moves to headcount to day-to-day confidence in the financial picture.
A Partnership Tested Early, and Strengthened
We evaluate every vendor on two things: good communication and best-in-class performance.
When we migrated to Alternative Payments, a syncing tool between our existing platform and the new system didn’t work as expected, and we had to roll back. It was frustrating, but the response is what we remember most, and what confirmed we’d picked the right partner rather than the wrong one. A specific point of contact walked us through the fix directly, and connected
us with the right people, and owned the mistake instead of deflecting it. We didn’t pull the plug, and the experience built more trust than a smooth implementation would have on its own.
Real-Time Visibility We Can Trust
Since moving to Alternative Payments, our view into the business’s payment health has changed in one meaningful way: we trust what we’re looking at. The reporting coming out of the previous system gave us reason to question whether it reflected reality. Now it does, and that changes how confidently we can make decisions about cash flow and growth rather than second-guessing the numbers in front of us.
“As the CEO, what I really care about is the number of late payments and how big they are. I have a lot more confidence in the results I’m seeing because of the systems on the back end. Before, I didn’t have that, and I was suspect.”
— Ben Tiggelaar, CEO and Owner
What Changed
“The ease of use for the client has gone up tenfold. Our clients love it. You have visibility, it’s quick, we can pull reports, and we can see things in real time.”
— Jason Richardson, VP of Operations
That shift shows up just as clearly in the numbers.
Before Alternative Payments
After Alternative Payments
Invoice-to-payment cycle
Slower, prone to failures needing manual investigation
Payable by clients the same day invoices are issued
Auto pay enrollment
Manual, cumbersome, hard to track who wasn’t enrolled
Trackable and incentivizable, turning a passive hope into an active lever
QuickBooks reconciliation
Loose integration, manual error-checking
Tighter integration, faster book closing
Leadership reporting
Data we had reason to question
Real-time visibility we can trust
What We'd Tell Another MSP Operator
Know where you are before you look at anything new. Document what your current process looks like, where the friction is, and what you need a new system to fix. If that picture isn’t clear
going in, it’s harder to evaluate whether a new tool will make things better.
The auto pay capabilities alone have been a game changer for us.
“It’s just the ease of the auto pay capabilities and being able to actually focus on finding the clients who aren’t on auto pay and flip them over. There’s a much bigger lift on our former
platform just to do that, and now it’s much easier. We can incentivize it.”
— Ben Tiggelaar, CEO and Owner
We run on consistency and hold every part of our operation to the same high standard.
Accounts receivable was the last area to catch up. With Alternative Payments in place, it no longer is.
If you’re running an MSP and accounts receivable hasn’t caught up to the rest of your operation, take a look at what Alternative Payments can fix
