Supplier Testimonial: Ewing Outdoor Supply
"From our standpoint, in my calculations, I’ve saved essentially two whole weeks of work for a single person."
BACKGROUND
- Stakeholder type: Accounts Receivable
- Title: Controller
- Industry: Landscape and Irrigation
Overview
A Controller at Ewing Outdoor Supply, a 1,000+ employee wholesale distribution company serving the landscape and irrigation industry, was managing a growing volume of virtual card payments as the business continued to scale. As the largest family-owned company in its industry in the United States, Ewing recently surpassed $1 billion in revenue and began working with more large corporate customers, many of which use virtual commercial cards. With virtual card volume increasing, the team faced growing manual work associated with running cards and applying cash. After being introduced to Boost through one of its partners, Ewing identified an opportunity to automate virtual card processing, reduce the workload on its cash application team and support a more scalable AR process.
Primary Use Case
“As [we became] a billion-dollar company, working a lot more with larger companies and corporate companies, other corporations, a lot of them use virtual credit cards. So it’s really grown our company. And frankly, we didn’t want to invest in putting more people into running cards. We had to find a sustainable solution.”
“A lot of it honestly for us is the actual running of the card itself. That process takes multiple minutes. And I have two people that apply cash or do manual adjustments and various elements of cash application. Again, two people for a billion dollar company is all we have and all our company is willing to currently invest for me to do it. So it was starting to become a need. We were starting to drop things off, to be frank, like small adjustments. We had to start having other sources, like our credit team, help us out with those because our cash application team could no longer maintain them. That was one of our real pain points and where we needed solutions.”
What is Most Valuable?
⌛Time Saving
“We’ve seen over 2,000 cards run. Most of those cards take two to three minutes. That’s virtually 5,000 minutes that I’ve saved people to reinvest into something else. It’s an enormous amount of time commitment that we have now saved. I was paying people overtime to run virtual credit cards. It wasn’t economical.
It has been a huge improvement to our team that we are now able to reinvest our time into, frankly, something more important. These cards are going to get run anyway at a certain value. We were looking honestly at things like even AI bots trying to run them and what kind of compliance issues that could cause. This was a much better solution that we knew was in compliance.”
💰Interchange Confidence
“Another thing for us is our interchange fees. We feel more reassured with the Boost interchange fee that it’s going to go in at the maximum rate. Our company was doing a switch [between payment providers] that has caused some of our merchant IDs and locations to not always run at the best interchange rate. So that was another kind of reassurance for us that we were making sure we hit the best interchange that we could.
Overall Experience
Customer Support
“For a monthly reconciliation, I was like, hey, could we get this report? Brandon and his team kind of jumped on that instantly, set up a meeting with me and have been really great in getting the kind of reporting I’m looking for. So yeah, the customer service side has been amazing.
Again, for the customer adoption too, Boost has been really great in being able to reach out to some of those customers where we need help, especially where it’s kind of the pay services. Working with them has been really great.”
Return on Investment
"For us, again, it’s been really good. I love the reporting with Boost. It’s really clear in the fees, both the interchange and the Boost fee, and that has helped us evaluate our return on investment here. From our standpoint, in my calculations, I’ve saved essentially two whole weeks of work for a single person, or my two people for one week, over just a couple few months. They’ve saved that time to reinvest.
To us, with what our corporate office is willing to invest in this team, in a cash application team, it’s been an amazing adoption for us because of our ability to now reinvest their time into more important or time-consuming tasks that are very customer related. It’s a lot about our customer relationship in an industry like ours.”
Scalability
“It seems like a great solution for us that does have the scalability. We’re still looking to adopt customers. So in that sense, Boost has really been helpful to help us push some of those customers that haven’t been as easy to adopt and work with them in customer outreach. If we want Boost to work with us directly, they can. If we want to handle that customer ourselves, they’ve also stepped aside and said, go ahead and take care of them. So I think that part of it has been good.
I was very impressed with the relationship that Boost has with some of those companies where they could adopt 100% of people almost with a flick of a wrist type of thing. It was almost overnight that these got switched. From our standpoint, that was extremely helpful in the immediate adoption. This wasn’t something that took months and months to get 50% adoption. It was almost literally overnight. We had over half of our customers adopted.”
Partnership
“I’m really happy with the service and I think you guys are doing a good job. To me, the biggest thing is working with us to try and make improvements. In that sense, from my standpoint, it feels more like a partnership rather than I’m paying you for a service.”
About Boost
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@Boost Payment Solutions