Ways to Accept Payments
Cross-Border Payments
Payment Optimization
Payment Types & Currencies
Fraud Prevention
Chargeback Management
Compliance
Payment Analytics & Reporting
Accounts Receivable Automation
Subscriptions & Recurring Billing
Invoice Payments
Virtual Terminal
Sandbox
ProductionProSites Case Study
“We like the fact that it’s a one-stop shop. It’s the magic triangle. You have Salesforce, you have Intacct, you have BlueSnap.”
Who Is ProSites?
ProSites is a digital marketing company that specializes in providing websites and online digital marketing services for small community professionals, specifically, lawyers, dentists, accountants and veterinarians. Understanding their specific needs, ProSites has developed a unique process and set of capabilities, allowing them to stand up clients’ websites in as little as 24 hours.
In addition, they provide other digital marketing services to support their clients’ strategies and goals, including paid advertising, SEO, and client nurturing and communication.
ProSites strives to help their clients grow their businesses, improve communication, reduce cancellations and increase their visibility. They also provide education options for their veterinary clients in addition to marketing.
The Challenge
While acquisitions have been a part of ProSites’ growth strategy, integrating the companies has created some challenges related to accounting and payments. Each acquisition came with its own invoicing processes and digital payments solution, requiring ProSites to manage five payment vendors and even more gateways and accounts.
Working with multiple payment vendors led to fragmentation, making account management and reconciliation difficult. And scalability was a challenge. ProSites was also leaning on external consultants to handle the technical elements of credit card processing and accounts receivable (AR), who worked asynchronously with the ProSites team. They could see the potential challenges if their consultants became unreachable for any reason.
At the same time, this high-growth company’s needs were surpassing their ERP’s capabilities. Since the desire was for the ERP to hook into their entire ecosystem, it made sense to consolidate payment vendors to a single integrated system and bring their AR function back in-house at the same time. For ProSites, this also meant replacing their manual invoicing processes with AR automation.
After choosing Sage Intacct for their ERP, ProSites initially chose a payment vendor that did not understand their business goals or urgency. The onboarding was prolonged and difficult, the platform was not user friendly, and the vendor surprised them with some unexpected underwriting fees towards the end of the implementation process.
ProSites realized this was not the right fit. They needed a single payment vendor that could quickly solve any issues and help them build a seamless, simpler solution to meet their needs.
The Solution
ProSites found BlueSnap through the Sage Intacct Marketplace — but only after also having heard about them from their previous unsuccessful vendor. After an initial conversation with BlueSnap, ProSites appreciated the team’s transparency and the Global Payment Orchestration Platform’s capabilities and usability. They decided to halt implementation with the previous vendor and chose BlueSnap.
The first steps included taking a fresh look at all the workflows and manual processes supporting their billing and collections, and reconsidering how everything could be done to design the best way forward and support the company’s growth. As ProSites found out, it’s not a quick-and-easy task, and having the right partner helped to avoid missteps.
“The element everybody underestimated is the complexity of the merchant world,” says Liezl Wakeling, CFO of ProSites. “It is a whole secret underground and so much happens behind the scenes, not visible to users. We ran into that with our previous processor, who was not transparent and did not guide us through the process. We ran into walls and worked with 20 different people to get one answer, and the implementation was just really inefficient.”
But things were different with BlueSnap. “BlueSnap offered a lot of transparency,” says Wakeling. “Bluesnap shared the pitfalls of merchant payments and said what could be done to help or avoid them.”
ProSites is using BlueSnap’s payment capabilities and AR automation software to automate the management and collection of invoice payments. This solution reduces the resources that must be dedicated to the AR process and offers a seamless interface to help the team stay on top of past-due bills.
The Results
While the relationship is still new, ProSites is already seeing some of the benefits of partnering with BlueSnap. “BlueSnap made implementation really easy,” says Wakeling. “We’ve had our hiccups and lessons learned, but BlueSnap is very responsive. And when we found a problem, we started digging and the [BlueSnap] team started digging. I like the partnership and I don’t know if any other merchant provider might have been that transparent.”
ProSites has successfully consolidated payments for all their companies under one vendor, and they have brought their AR processes in-house. Thanks to the AR Automation software, they have been able to reduce the time spent on manual processes, integrate credit card cashflow application within their ERP system, cut down on human error, and set up contingencies for when someone is on vacation or otherwise unavailable. They have also given access to their customer support team so they can immediately see an account’s status and then send a payment link or accept a payment. This allows ProSites to accept payments when it makes sense for their clients, improving the customer experience.
ProSites is excited about all of the functionality available through the Global Payment Orchestration Platform that they might use to support additional use cases in the future. Managing payments is now much more streamlined for ProSites, and they have a more sustainable process in place for when they acquire future companies. “We like the fact that it’s a one-stop shop,” says Wakeling, citing BlueSnap as an essential part of their tech stack. “It’s the magic triangle. You have Salesforce, you have Intacct, you have BlueSnap.”