When it comes to accounts receivable, there are manual approaches — and then there’s how Peak Design used to do it.
The premium travel gear maker’s entire AR process essentially ran through a single physical mailbox at its San Francisco headquarters: Peak’s VP of finance opened envelopes, sorted paper checks, snapped photos of remittance details, and then sent the information over Slack to an offshore team in the Philippines, before finally walking to the bank to deposit the checks.
Aside from being tedious and slow, this system was rife with confusion. For example, a payment might arrive under a name that was different from the customer who sent it, said Karen Kimble, Controller for Peak Design. Matching a single payment to the right invoice, especially when it contained missing information, often meant digging back through email threads.
“Recording payments was a big pain point for the finance accounting team,” Kimble said. We needed some automation.”
The costs of this ad-hoc approach went beyond just wasted hours. Customers who had already paid kept receiving past-due notices, causing unnecessary friction. Meanwhile, Peak’s small finance team was unable to focus on the higher-value work of actually growing the business.
For Peak, it eventually became clear that the existing AR approach was unsustainable and the process needed to be streamlined and modernized.
Why Paystand
Peak’s first AR automation partner looked great on paper, but didn’t pan out in practice; The platform lacked lockbox capabilities, still leaving the finance team saddled with hands-on reconciliation for every transaction.
It was clear that automation alone wasn’t a solution in and of itself — Peak needed the right kind of automation.
For Peak it was a matter of finding the right automation that would transform hands-on tasks into autonomous operations. That’s when they turned to Paystand, Kimble said. Two capabilities stood out immediately, she noted. The first was Smart Lockbox check processing, a direct solution to the company’s office mailbox congestion. The second was Paystand’s auto-matching function, which enabled Peak to match incoming payments against open invoices automatically, without a human team member having to get involved.
"Paystand offered a solution that would touch on all of our pain points,” Kimble said. “The lockbox piece was a big win for us."
Support for applying credit memos during payment was also key. Peak regularly has customers who want to apply a credit balance before paying an invoice — a scenario that, without automation, would have added significant manual work back into the process.
What changed
Since partnering with Paystand, Peak’s AR processes look quite different from the old version. Checks mailed to the company’s office are a thing of the past; now, they’re routed automatically to a Paystand lockbox. Meanwhile, ACH payments made through Peak’s customer portal are matched and posted automatically, with no manual invoice-hunting required.
Peak has found a number of more valuable ways to redeploy that saved time. Freed from opening envelopes and depositing checks manually, the company’s VP of Finance now has more bandwidth for the strategic work the role was intended for, such as “running analysis for the product team of which products should go to market, which products are profitable, how’s our cash flow,” Kimble said.
Customers benefit too, with no more incorrect past-due notices or email back-and-forth required to locate or pay an invoice. The automation also has helped Peak keep its finance team streamlined as the business has grown. Kimble noted that without the AR overhaul, additional headcount would likely have been necessary to keep pace with the increased transaction volume.
“Paystand has helped us scale,” said Kimble. “If we had to do all that manually, we potentially would need another hire for our AR."
What's ahead
With its core AR processes now modernized, Peak’s next challenge is optimizing payments for its fastest-growing segment: international customers. Accepting payments in multiple currencies via direct wire — the preferred format for many international payers — can require significant manual processing work, and multi-currency invoicing adds another layer of complexity for a lean team.
As Peak's business becomes more global, Paystand is expanding right alongside it. The platform now supports collection across 11 currencies and a growing set of local payment rails, including Canadian EFT, so international customers can pay the way they prefer, without adding manual work back into Peak's process.
For a lean finance team supporting a growing global business, the benefits of applying automation to AR quickly compound. As Kimble put it: The goal is a system where payments work more smoothly, seamlessly and conveniently for both Peak’s customers and its finance team alike — and that optimization scales along with the business as it continues its upward ascent.
Contact Paystand to discuss how AR automation can help solve your company’s payment pain points.
