From Paper Invoices to Paid on Time

Winthrop Supply uses Dill to get paid faster and cut its AR team's workload in half.

The Challenge

Winthrop Supply, a fourth-generation, family-owned distributor serving service plumbers, ran accounts receivable almost entirely by hand: staff handwrote orders and mailed invoices one at a time, and a customer with a billing question had no option but to call in.

Large purchases from unfamiliar customers carried their own risk: a charge could come back as unrecoverable fraud, and every card payment carried a processing fee Winthrop Supply had no way to recover.

On top of the fraud exposure and fee losses, customers had no single place to see everything they owed for the month. Winthrop Supply emailed a PDF invoice with every sale, but as CFO Andrew Rutherford puts it, "there wasn't a good place for our customers to go to and see all their invoices for the month... it was hard to be sure they got them all accounted for." Customers were asking for an easier way to see what they owed so they could pay it.

The Solution

Winthrop Supply deployed Dill's online payment portal, integrated directly with its Sage ERP, giving customers a self-service way to view every invoice for the month and pay it without picking up the phone. Every payment made in the portal syncs automatically to Winthrop Supply's own Sage records, and the platform lets the company pass its credit card processing fee to the customer at the point of sale instead of absorbing it.

The Results

Lifted on-time payment collections by 29%
Captured 11 of the company's 16 best months for on-time collections in five years of data, all since going live with Dill
Cut daily AR payment entry roughly in half
Closed a recurring credit card fraud exposure on large, unfamiliar purchases
Gave trade customers a self-service portal to check balances and pay invoices without calling in

"It's given our customers a nice portal to rely on so they don't have to pick up the phone every time they have a billing question. It's right there at their fingertips. It solved a lot of problems all at once."

Will Steck

President Winthrop Supply

Sage ERP Integration Was the Easy Part

Winthrop Supply expected the Sage connection to be the hardest part of the switch. The ERP is "pretty sophisticated," says Molly Steck, Winthrop Supply's CEO, and integrations with outside software "can be tricky, but it seemed like [Dill] figured it out." But ERP integration is exactly what Dill is built to handle, and the connection went live without the friction Winthrop Supply had braced for.

Once the portal was live, the Sage connection held up: a payment made in Dill's portal shows up in Winthrop Supply's own Sage records without anyone re-entering it. "The fact that we log in, click buttons, and customers click buttons and everything syncs up, and we're reading accurate numbers at the end of the day, saves us all the headache in the world," Molly Steck says.

Cutting AR Workload in Half

Dill now handles roughly half of the payment entries Winthrop Supply's staff previously keyed in by hand every day. "They just took a workload off of us," says Molly Steck. "They shortened our AR process every day by entering 50% of our payments that we then weren't also having to do." That freed-up time went toward other work at Winthrop Supply instead.

Closing a Credit Card Fraud Gap

A large, unfamiliar purchase used to be a gamble for Winthrop Supply. "We've gotten stung in the past on our credit card machine," says Will Steck. "Someone will come make a large purchase, and then it's reported as fraud, and we'd get screwed over on that." A card swiped in person, or read off over the phone, left no way to confirm who was behind it until the charge either cleared or came back weeks later as a dispute.

Dill's one-time payment link changes that: the link goes straight to the customer, who enters their own card details and completes the purchase themselves. "That payment link has been nice for situations where we're kind of unsure," he says.

Recovering Credit Card Processing Fees

Dill also lets Winthrop Supply pass its credit card processing fee to the customer at the point of payment, instead of absorbing it on every sale the way it once had to. "[Dill] gave us the ability to pass those credit card fees on to customers," Will Steck says. "That saved us a lot of money in the end."

On-Time Payments Hit a Five-Year High

CFO Andrew Rutherford watches closely how much of each month's collections come in on time. Winthrop Supply lifted on-time payment collections by 29% (from a 38% pre-Dill average). Looking back across five years of monthly data, 11 of Winthrop Supply's 16 best months for on-time collections have happened since Dill went live.