By Bill Cushard, General Manager, ServiceRocket‍

Helping customers implement software is our business at ServiceRocket.

That's why when we implement software ourselves, you’d think we would do it pretty well. At the very least, you might say we are slightly paranoid about not following our own methodology.  

So, when we implemented YayPay, accounts receivable management software, we wanted to make sure the implementation was successful.  

First, we made a list of outcomes we wanted to accomplish. It may sound overly simplified, but a critical ingredient of any successful software project is knowing why you bought the software in the first place.

It is easy to lose sight of that.  

We knew what we wanted to accomplish when we rolled out YayPay:

1. Reduce days sales outstanding (DSO)

2. Integrate/automate with Netsuite

3. Free up time for strategic finance work

4. Improve the customer experience

Outcomes one through three are obvious; they are the typical outcomes you might expect following a rollout of accounts receivable management software. The last one might not seem so obvious, but it was a major reason we signed up for YayPay. I will explain below.  

Note: You can read more about our YayPay experience in The Rise of Revenue Heroes series by YayPay.

Outcome: reduce DSO by 10-15%
All businesses want to minimize the time between when a sale is made and cash is collected.

That outcome is measured by the metric known as days sales outstanding (DSO). In the short time we’ve been using YayPay, we have reduced our DSO by 10-15%. Not bad.  

Improving DSO is our success outcome, which means our interest was not in using YayPay. It was to improve accounts receivables and cash flow as measured by DSO. If we had implemented YayPay and DSO did not improve, it would not have made any difference if we had launched it successfully.  

Tip: When you implement software, start with your success outcomes. Ask your vendor to help you achieve that success outcome. In this case, DSO.  

Listen: To learn more about the difference between product outcomes and success outcomes, listen to my interview with Paul Henderson, author of The Outcome Generation, on Helping Sells Radio podcast.  

YayPay helps us get more out of NetSuite
If the ultimate measure of success of a software rollout is a success outcome, another is getting more out of an existing software product. For us, this means that YayPay helps us get more out of our investment in Netsuite.

We depend on Netsuite (or something similar), but it cannot do everything, and there are other tools that do certain functions better than Netsuite. The more we can add these specialized tools onto Netsuite, the more value we get out of it.  

YayPay integrates well with Netsuite. Without this tight integration, our team would have to work in two tools separately and manually, making each tool less valuable.  

Both tools, working together, help us to maximize the value of each tool.

Automation frees up valuable time
‍When our finance team does not have to follow up with customers, they have more time for other high value activities, like closing the books or optimizing cash balances. Knowing that YayPay deals with the follow up and brings our DSO to an optimized state frees up our finance team to support our business at a strategic level. Yay indeed!

Improving the customer experience
One generally does not think of implementing an accounts receivable automation system as a means to improve the customer experience. Yet every time a customer receives an invoice, an invoice reminder or a confirmation of payment, they’re having a brand experience.

If the invoices look bad or reminders are sent in errors or payments are not applied correctly, customers have bad experiences, and those bad experiences reflect poorly on the brand.  

What is the value of having a smooth, well-designed, efficient invoicing and accounts receivable reminder and payment system that makes it easy on customers? Fabulous.

Listen: Coincidently, I had a conversation with customer experience expert Sue Duris on the nature of bad invoicing and its impact on the customer experience. Listen to that on our Helping Sells Radio.  

Minimize things falling through the cracks
Though we did have specific outcomes in mind, our CEO Rob Castaneda describes the reason we implemented YayPay this way: “The consistency of how the business is running, knowing nothing is falling through the cracks...as a CEO, that’s priceless.”

If you'd like to read more about our YayPay story, please visit the YayPay blog. They have a series of customer stories called The Rise of Revenue Heroes in which they showcase the achievements of their customers. We are honored to have been the first story in the series.  

Thanks YayPay!

Bill Cushard covers the intersection of learning, software adoption, and customer success. His career has focused on helping companies adopt disruptive software through learning, change management, communications, and implementations that help people get the most out of software. Bill's 2018 book is The Art of Agile Marketing: A Practical Roadmap for Implementing Kanban and Scrum in Jira and Confluence.