How Payflow ditched spreadsheets to automate payment operations with Payable

Launched in Madrid in 2020, Payflow offers salary advancements as an employee benefit - employees get instant access to their hard-earned salary instead of waiting for the payroll day. Today Payflow serves 500+ customers (and growing!) providing salary advancements to more than 300,000+ employees across Europe and Latin America.

The challenge

As Payflow grew from a European startup into a global powerhouse spanning two continents and hundreds of clients, the scope of their payment operations skyrocketed. They soon discovered that spreadsheets simply couldn't keep pace with the growing scale and volume of invoices and payment flows and they were constantly running into challenges.

• Scaling financial operations
  Payflow was struggling to keep up with all payment flows across different currencies and regions as they grew. Their finance team had no way of knowing when they can expect customer payments and how long it would take to collect the funds.
• Time spent on manual reconciliation
  Allocating and reconciling monthly salary advancements to each employee against the actual amount paid was especially problematic as advancement rates varied month on month. That meant manually matching increasing volume of payments with invoices (suplidos) which was not sustainable.
• Working capital constraints
  Payflow’s saw gradual increase in their payment collection period which added additional strain in their access to working capital to fund more customer loans.
• Complex range of payments data sources
  Colombian and Peruvian banks don’t have APIs available to pull data automatically, and have formats with variable data points. This meant patching together lots of different formats in spreadsheets to work out who had paid what.
• Siloed processes
  Each regional team was managing their own operations with separate spreadsheets and processes. Payflow needed to centralise all data and ways of working into one single process globally to have full visibility on what’s happening within the business.

The solution

Payflow chose Payable to automate their reconciliation process and give them full cash visibility across all their regions, business entities and currencies.

Connected data sources
Payable built connections to all Payflow’s bank accounts using open banking, direct bank connections and manual file uploads. To support Colombian and Peruvian banks, Payable introduced a file upload tool that automatically maps all data points into the dashboard. Payflow is able to add any bank data needed and have a complete aggregated view of reconciled transactions.

From manual to automated reconciliation
Payflow can track, match and attribute all lending transactions to individual customers using Payable's API and dashboard, ensuring the correct amount of funds is allocated to the right account.

Single source of truth
Payflow’s data is now centralised in one single dashboard giving every team access to regional data to manage their day to day operations. And the finance team has instant visibility of live cash balances for reporting and supporting Payflow with strategic decisions.

Results

• Time saved on manual tasks
  Payable has saved their finance team 8 hours each week automating at least 40% of manual work from logging into separate banking portals and piecing together data just to get a glimpse of Payflow's working capital.
• Faster access to working capital
  Payflow reconciles over €5m through Payable with 95% match rate. This has helped their finance team to reduce the time it takes to pay invoices from 25 days to just a few days and unlock 30% more working capital to finance new lending streams.
• Proactive financial management
  Payflow's team is now able to see a complete view of all reconciled payments across multiple legal entities, automatically flagging any unpaid or underpaid transactions in comparison to the expected transaction. Reporting to the board and investors suddenly became a lot easier.

Talk about efficiency!