How Side reduced overdue invoices from 75% to 25% with Upflow

In early 2020, when Grégory joined Side, the DSO was more than twice what it was supposed to be. It was up to 64 days when the objective was 30, and 75% of invoices were overdue.

Grégory did not have the time to chase after amounts lower than €5,000. There were too many unpaid invoices and he had no choice but to prioritize exclusively on large invoices. That’s how Side ended up with almost 5% of write-offs: they just couldn’t collect it all. In many cases, the cash collection battle was over before it even started.

Now with Upflow, Grégory can easily handle invoices from €1 to €1m thanks to the cash collection workflows he designed. The DSO is invariably below 30 days, 75% of invoices are now paid before the due date, and Side no longer performs write-offs.

One of Grégory’s goals was to significantly improve Side’s payment mix. When he joined, more than 70% of payments were wire transfers, giving the team very little control over when they received money. The rest was 28% via direct debit and 2% by card.

Side’s customer relations drastically improved thanks to Upflow. The communications sent via Upflow helped them convert progressively to more predictable payment options. By June 2022, only 16% of payments were still processed via wire transfer, while direct debit represented 73% of payments. Monthly follow-up tasks also dropped from 114 hours to 57 hours, and the team reached a 100% success rate at cash collection.

Before Grégory set up Upflow to mirror Side’s needs, cash collection was an extremely time-consuming and ineffective process. At the time, 100% of the finance team’s 450 monthly tasks were done manually.

Today, Upflow helps him prioritize tasks and he spends 50% less time on cash collection. What used to be purely reactive work has become a proactive strategy. By June 2022, only 14% of the team’s 900 actions are manual.

On reporting to the accounting team: “I used to spend a week every quarter trying to find specific pieces of information they needed in our over-complicated Excel file. Now it takes me a day tops!”

Without Upflow, you can only focus on the big amounts, because the data is all over the place and you don’t know what to do or where to start. With Upflow, Grégory knows instantly what to do every day.

The Finance team can now know at a glance: how much money is out, what their DSO is, how much they collected, and which accounts are at risk. Before Upflow, Grégory used to spend 1.5 hours preparing for customer calls, gathering information from Excel spreadsheets, the CRM, and the bank. Now he can see it all in one central location on Upflow’s account timeline.