How accountant Stuart Hurst is helping his clients sleep at night with iwocaPay

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Manchester accountant Stuart Hurst leads the Northern Hub at Accounts and Legal; helping clients set and reach their goals using smart tech integrations to give a service that goes beyond traditional accounting.

Over time, Stuart found himself doing more and more work to help his clients with cash flows - especially during the pandemic. For 9 out of 10 of his clients, their payables were ‘massively outweighed’ by their outstanding invoices. Stuart needed a solution that would help his clients get the cash they needed in the bank sooner, without relying on them to chase after it. Generally, clients were taking a ‘hope for the best’ approach to getting paid, reluctant to chase payments for fear of damaging relationships with customers. ‘There’s a tendency to pay who screams the loudest. If you don’t ask for it you don’t get.’ Ultimately it leads to a chain of cash flow juggling, where someone's waiting to be paid so that they can pay someone else. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone involved and it needs to stop.

“One of the things that keeps you up at night is the money you’re owed. It's (iwocaPay) certainly something my dad could have done with 20 years ago, people not paying promptly certainly wreaked havoc on our lives for sure. Especially right now with COVID there are a lot of people under financial pressure.”

Using new tech to solve an age old problem

Stuart added iwocaPay to his payment tools alongside Stripe and GoCardless. iwocaPay goes beyond just taking payments by adding a simple checkout to your invoices; your customers choose to Pay Now or Pay Later and spread the cost over 3 months.  Unlike the others, with iwocaPay up front payments are free for your client and their customer. ‘Pay Now is great and it’s free - so it saves a few pennies for those that are really watching the cost and makes paying easier.’ If they opt to Pay Later your client pays a fixed % fee (charged at the end of the month) to cover the credit and collections costs, and their client pays interest after 30 days. It’s a ‘pay as you go’ model based on usage, there’s no subscription fees or payment charges. No matter what the customer chooses your client gets paid the full amount the second their customer checks out.

‘It’s sorted right at the start of the relationship, it's a great way of offering customers extended terms but you still get the money right away. It’s one less thing to worry about. You sleep a little bit easier at night, which is a bit cheesy, but true.’

Better yet, iwocaPay integrates seamlessly with Xero (with more platforms in the pipeline) making reconciliation effortless. “I love the fact that everythings connected. Xero is my absolute favourite accounting product. It's our main tool, but you can’t just stop there, that’s just ridiculous in this day and age. You’re leaving value on the table.’ With iwocaPay Stuart can get even more visibility into his clients finances, helping him work with clients to create strategic plans and make real improvements - going above and beyond just saving tax money and setting up compliance - and save them time on invoice admin like reconciling invoices.

‘The accounts receivable bit of accounting is always an interesting one because it's the bit that often gets the least love but is the most important. iwocaPay is one of those tools that makes accounts receivables better and as a trusted advisor it's our job to tell them about it. It’s not complicated, it's very accessible and it's a quick win on the payment side of things.’

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