At Buildlane our customers are strictly interior design and build businesses. We are also building custom furniture – often on a project basis with multiple pieces of furniture with each order. This means our invoices, and subsequently customer payments, can be quite large.
What we have been looking for in an invoicing / payment processor seems simple but has alluded us for years. Our requirements are:
- Customers can enter ACH details and process a payment in under a minute
- Those ACH details can be saved for future use
- Buildlane doesn’t pay credit card fees (but the customer can and the calculation is done for me)
- Little restrictions on payment size or invoices being open for months (deposit and balance paid months apart)
These requirements seem pretty universal for the entire design industry. Or really any company that is business-to-business working on month-long projects. And yet, we looked for years and gave this list to many processors and no one could say yes, until now.
Finding Hyfin
I had given up my search for a good processor when I received a payment request from Plycon Van Lines. We ship yearly in the six-digits with Plycon and have been forced to pay each invoice individually with the most antiquated web form. It was a three page process that made you re-enter the same info over and over again. And some fields had copy/paste disabled which was even more tedious – and surely adding the chance of human error.
But then one day a couple of weeks ago Plycon sent a new invoice and 30 seconds later we had paid the invoice and our bank details were saved to make the next invoice even faster. I couldn’t believe it. I checked the URL of the invoice we received and set up a meeting with Hyfin that day.
Customer Experience
First, the customer management and invoicing is just as simple as you’d expect. If you’re familiar with QuickBooks, Freshbooks, Ivy, etc. this is all very standard.
You can send the invoice via email, text, or as a link. The customer has a very quick form and once they submit their details they can process a payment instantly.
I’m sure you’ve noticed the emphasis on credit cards on this screen. We will get to that in a second.
But as you can see, it doesn’t get any more simple than that.
Credit Card Fees
Credit card fees are basically mandatory with a consumer facing business. But if your customers are all reoccurring business partners giving them the option to pay by credit card is unnecessarily expensive. Buildlane accepted credit card payments for years and I really don’t want to remember how much our yearly credit card processing costs were.
What might be Hyfin’s most distinct feature is pushing the credit card fee onto the customer. We all work with companies that are already doing this (think… fabric). But you are left to figure out the calculation yourself and are often submitting your credit card details via a scanned paper form. Hyfin is the only credit card processor I could find that pushes it on the customer (if they so choose of course).
I don’t like giving the credit card companies a portion of our hard earned money, but if you must, feel free. You just have to pay the fees.
Restrictions
Most online payment processors are huge companies that, in my experience, don’t really want to deal with the design industry. The ideal customer for Stripe or QuickBooks is a consumer facing company swiping lots and lots of credit cards. Which makes sense. Why would they devote resources to ACH payments when they make a tiny fraction of the fees they collect with credit cards?
Large payment processors also don’t like “split payments”. They prefer you buy a coffee, the card gets charged, you drink the coffee, and the transaction is over. Most projects in the design space take months, some years. We’re often collecting a deposit on an invoice and several months later collection the balance. The large processors assess risk with complicated algorithms designed for consumer facing businesses. Why are you paying for half your coffee in January and half in August?
As such, things like reserves and payment limits are often placed on design businesses. In our case we had no chargebacks or any other blemishes in processing credit cards for four years when Stripe decided to place crippling restrictions on our account. And with a company that large no one is able to deviate from what the algorithm says.
Hyfin encourages large transactions. And payment installments are one of the main features on their invoicing screen. Break an invoice into as many payments as you want!
Pricing
The Hyfin software only costs $35 per month. The credit card fees are all paid by the customer (if they choose to pay that way of course).
However, you will pay a fee for ACH payments that is a percentage of the payment amount. This may seem like a ‘gotcha’ as many processors put a cap on the amount they will charge per ACH transaction. What they don’t say is they also put other restrictions, like payment caps, which makes the fee cap somewhat meaningless.
By adding the ability for our customers to pay by credit card and letting Hyfin take the chance that there will be good revenue from that we were able to negotiate a very acceptable ACH fee. I won’t tell you our rate, but make sure you negotiate there as that rate is somewhat at their discretion.
Trying Hyfin
Much like Buildlane, you can schedule a demo with Hyfin. I talked to Janelle and Joe over there so if you get to talk to them tell them Frank from Buildlane says hi!
