Solar contractors ease payment, billing headaches with PayStand

Solar contractors are in a constant battle against soft costs, so every effort at adding efficiency helps. Solar industry installers, distributors, manufacturers, and power producers are facing increasing cost pressures and competition as the industry grows. Frequently these companies have disparate and fragmented systems in place for their billing and payments that increase the cost of their cash and require high degrees of financial and IT labor.

Operationally, these legacy systems often mean solar businesses are taking a combination of extremely expensive credit cards (fees of 3% or more!), manually intensive bank payments, and a staggering number of paper checks that delay cash settlement. Rarely do these payments tie back to the financial systems or the POs/invoices, so manual labor and reconciliation end up introducing needless costs in lost productivity and customer maintenance.

Few solar companies have in place an end-to-end digital process for their cash management: from accounting software, to invoice, to receivables, to payments, to settlement, to reconciliation.

Meet PayStand

PayStand, is a cloud payment suite helps the solar industry eliminate some of their largest financial challenges in accounts receivables and payables.

With PayStand, solar distributors, manufacturers, and installers, can take payments across multiple channels such as PayStand’s 0% network, as well as echeck bank transfers, and wholesale ACH and card transactions all-in-one system. Further, PayStand works directly with invoices, automating financial processes alongside accounting software, and ads powerful management & reporting capabilities.

Four steps for converting more solar sales

PayStand has recently added Allterra Solar, Geoscape Solar, Gunthers, and Simplify Solar to its ranks of solar customers. With PayStand, these new customers are enjoying the many benefits including: faster time to cash, a frictionless customer payment experience, automation & improved billing efficiencies, and significantly reduced transaction costs.

“PayStand has been a tremendous asset to our business. I don’t have many partnerships I can trust like PayStand,” said James Allen, CEO of Allterra Solar. “They helped consolidate our multi vendor billing process, they lowered our transactional costs by 24%, and improved the speed we receive cash by over 2x. Not only that, but it’s nice that our team can pickup the phone and folks over there know us by name.”

“PayStand has helped Simplify Solar streamline efficiency in the solar market by not only coordinating payments with our customers but also with our vendors,” said Sohail Hassan, CEO of Simplify Solar. “This helps us achieve our mission to lower industry soft costs typically related to solar.”

— Solar Builder magazine

[source: http://solarbuildermag.com/news/solar-contractors-ease-accounting-headaches-with-paystand/]