As the managing director of accounting, bookkeeping, and operations services firm T-Accounts, LLC Jane Gilpin knows a thing or two about customer service. Working with organizations ranging from under $1 million USD to up to $20 million USD in annual revenue, her team of six works hard to ensure their client experience is as seamless as possible.
With her San Diego-based business, Gilpin has the ability to tap into existing vendor relationships from the national level, including one with a well-known billing and payments provider. For Gilpin, while there were a lot of positives to that option, she found it clunky, with duplicative workflows and check-ridden processes. So, she went on the hunt for a payments solution to better serve her organization’s needs.
“I was looking for a solution for collecting payments from customers, which is what sparked the transition,” recalled Gilpin. “We came across Veem at the Scaling New Heights Conference [a leading accounting technology event], and we decided to see what they had to offer.”
Once up and running with Veem in her office, Gilpin saw how it could support client operations as well. One of the biggest benefits of the service was its ease of integration with QuickBooks, and the ability to tailor the approach based on the customer. Other payment providers synced with QuickBooks, but Gilpin found that with them, it was all or nothing. In those cases, it meant she had to connect all of her clients—whether they were QuickBooks users or not—with the system, which created back-end clean-up requirements. In addition, there was manual work to attach the invoice paid in both environments.
Veem offered a more straightforward workflow that meant only acknowledging transactions once, with simple updates in both places. “With Veem, QuickBooks can acknowledge that an invoice has been paid, saving us from duplicate payments or requests for payment,” said Gilpin.
In addition, Veem offered a path for multiple invoice approvers. Many times, client invoices would have different line items that required different departmental sign offs, and other solutions didn’t have a mechanism for that to occur easily. With Veem, the system allows for a set up with multiple approvals, helping to streamline and digitize what once were manual operations.
“Veem is a huge time saver,” said Gilpin. “It’s giving clients that digital approval process for bill pay. Back when everyone was in the office and not remote, teams would send hard copy invoices around, and you would have to physically move around a piece of paper to get sign off. Veem provides the technology for that approval process. It’s much better and more secure, and time savings goes hand-in-hand with it.”
But for Gilpin, the chief differentiator for any vendor is its customer service. Being in that role herself, Gilpin appreciates having support when there’s an issue or question.
“The one thing I really like is the customer service we get from Veem. We can reach out and talk to a human that can walk us through something, and that’s huge. I know it costs Veem money, but it makes a big difference. The support staff is very responsive, and we always have quick turnaround on communications.”
And that experience is worth its weight in gold as her business scales up. In fact, having a negative customer service experience with another provider is what prompted the Supporting Strategies team to consider expanding how they use Veem.
“We had an experience with a competitive system where an international payment got lost, and it took a full month for it to come back,” Gilpin recalled. “Over that time, there was minimal communication, and they weren’t really able to assist. We have not had that same experience with Veem, and we hope that continues as we expand into more international items.”
International transactions are a potential area of growth for Supporting Strategies as businesses of all sizes get increasingly global. With Veem an option, the team knows they will not only have transparency into those payment details but a seamless connection to QuickBooks as well, lessening the time required to upload and reconcile what makes for more complicated remittance and payments.
“We did have a client with international transactions with another provider, and we had to go through and download the remittance information and then upload it again into QuickBooks because there was no integration. Not having to do that with Veem is huge, and I think it helps us from an international standpoint. We have a handful of businesses that operate internationally, and we see a more frequent need for that streamlined international payment process,” said Gilpin.
As the company continues to grow, so too, do its operations, and Gilpin sees an increasing role for Veem as the future unfolds.
“I’ve had a couple of colleagues ask me about Veem, and I tell them to try it out. We like it, use it, and prefer it over others. Plus, Veem continues to improve the product, which is always positive.”
Veem is a global payments network built for businesses. We began in 2014 with the intention of making international money transfers as simple as purchasing a cup of coffee. Since then, we’ve revolutionized the way businesses pay and get paid around the world by empowering owners, accountants, and financial professionals to take control over their payment processes. We level the playing field by providing enterprise-level financial tools and negotiating power to the small businesses who need it most.