Is Your Construction Credit Department a Competitive Advantage?

An Online Portal Built for Contractors

It's no secret that your contractor customers work in the field. This means that they will have limited access to a desktop computer, but will always have access to their smartphone. That's why it's important that you give your customers a portal that they can use in the palm of their hand. A portal that is built to be fully mobile responsive, doesn't have to be downloaded and is intuitively easy to use. But don't just take our word for it, here is a quote from the Chairman of The Home Depot.

"The front door of our store is no longer the front door of our stores ... It's in the customer's pocket, it's on the jobsite, it's in their homes..." - Craig Menear

That's why at Suppli we built our online portal from the ground-up. Allowing construction suppliers and vendors to offer their customers 24/7 online access from their phone.

Don't think your customers want to pay online? We'll bet they do.. A great crew change is taking place in construction, and by 2024 over 60% of your customers will have been born after 1980. This mean's it's time to build for the future, not the past.

Reporting

Access to clean and simple reporting is critical to managing your accounts receivable. Often construction suppliers and vendors are offering tens of millions in trade credit without the tools to actively monitor this portfolio.

ERPs are built for accountants. Suppli is built for credit departments. While ERPS like EPICOR, DMSI and Sage give you access to your general ledger, they still require credit departments to download and manually manipulate this data to figure out when to perform mission critical actions like filing liens, sending reminders and escalating issues.

With Suppli, you have a dashboard that visualizes your AR portfolio and alerts you to key issues and flags past due accounts.

Construction suppliers and vendors are often managing risk on an project-by-project basis, which is why you can also easily monitor project-level exposures in Suppli.

Lastly, in one-click you can get access to critical reports such as AR by credit manager, location and salesperson so you can gauge relative performance across your department.

Communication Tools

Successfully managing credit is all about having a strong customer relationship.

The construction industry is largely a relationship business, and nowhere are customer relationships more important than in the credit department. That's why it is critical that credit managers communicate frequently with their customers. Customer communication can be most effective when you take a multi-channel approach. This means not only phone calls and emails, but also text messages, especially with a customer base that is typically on the jobsite. Also ask yourself, are you more likely to respond to a text or an email? 

That's why with Suppli we allow credit managers to communicate with their customers from their phones, with features like email and text embedded into the software and free of charge.

Only by engaging in frequent customer communication can you gain valuable insight into things like the status of a project or why a customer is having payment issues.

Alerts and Activity Trackers

Credit managers have a lot on their plates. Often times one person or a small team is managing thousands of customers and tens of millions of trade credit. Without the right tools, it can be extremely difficult to keep track of key risks and avoid costly mistakes. These risks include:

• Missing lien deadlines
• Customer disputes
• Payment issues such as bad-checks
• And more...

Not addressing any one of these risks can potentially cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is why it is critical for any credit manager to actively monitor their AR portfolio. To help credit managers monitor these risks we've built in key activity alerts, such as when a payment has failed or a dispute has been created.

Suppli also maintains a record of all actions performed on both an invoice and customer-level. That way in one-click you can get a complete picture of all the activity related to a customer.

Having all of a customer's activity in one place allows credit managers to file liens and collections reports in a matter of clicks. Gone are the days of having to dig through emails and post-it notes.

Automatic Cash Application

Cash application is the process of correctly applying payments to invoices, and nobody knows this process more than a credit manager. Credit managers often have to deal with incorrectly applied funds or payments with no remittance information. This often means having an annoyed customer or worse yet having to track down what a payment is for.

Cash application can often be a thankless job, which is why with Suppli we automate the entire cash application process. We are able to do this because every payment made within Suppli is tied to an individual or group of invoices. We also integrate with things like credit memos, deposits and other AR adjustments. That way your customer always has a complete overview of their balance.

Suppli's software can integrate with any ERP. So you can say goodbye to manual double data entry.

About Suppli

Suppli is a digital accounts receivable platform that enables construction material suppliers and vendors to turn their credit department into a competitive advantage. Top material vendors leverage Suppli to deliver the digital customer experience their customers demand and supercharge their credit teams with tools to get paid faster and reduce risk. Suppli is led by a veteran founding team of building materials suppliers, software engineers and financial experts.

For more information, or to schedule a demo, please visit gosuppli.com.

‍

‍