Energetyczny Projekt turned the cost of chasing payments into revenue

Energetyczny Projekt builds homes and carries out energy-efficiency retrofits for private customers, mostly in smaller towns. The company had a proven way of dealing with late payments, but it ran by hand, so it was slow, uneven and expensive.

Customers pay, just late

The company’s customers usually own property, so they almost always pay in the end. The problem is when they pay.

Many of them are older and don’t use email much, and some need a phone call before anything happens. Payments often depend on grants and subsidies too, especially for energy-efficiency retrofits, which pushes dates out even further. Krzysiek Romaniak, the company’s co-founder, says his customers are terrible at paying on time.

The old process looked like this.

• One person spent part of every week checking balances, calling and texting customers and asking account managers to follow up.
• When reminders didn’t work, the case went to a law firm.
• The next step was a listing in the KRD or BIG debtor registers.
• Court was the last resort.

It usually worked, because customers paid once a law firm was involved or a court case was near. But it was slow and ran in fits and starts. All in, collections cost PLN 5,000 to 10,000 a month in staff time, legal fees and registry subscriptions, and some cash was tied up in overdue invoices.

“Chasing money is work most people simply aren’t built for, psychologically. You’re calling people who react badly and you have to stay assertive. And before, the whole thing depended on whether the team had time. Someone’s sick, someone’s on leave, and the process loses its rhythm.”
Krzysiek Romaniak, co-founder of Energetyczny Projekt

An ERP module would have meant a large upfront cost

Krzysiek expected a big IT project. A collections module for the company’s Enova ERP would have cost around PLN 25,000 and taken months to roll out.

Most of the work in setting up Sunbay went into preparing document templates and agreeing on the order of steps. The company pays per invoice handled, so there was no large upfront cost.

“I assumed this would be expensive, long and painful. The biggest shock was how fast it went.”
Krzysiek Romaniak

The process runs in the background, every day

Sunbay connected to Fakturownia, where the company issues its invoices, and took over the whole manual workflow.

• Reminders go out before and after the due date, starting on the day the invoice is issued.
• Unpaid invoices move to the next steps automatically.
• Sunbay issues interest notes for overdue invoices, and customers pay them.
• Nobody checks balances by hand or keeps a spreadsheet.

Reminders start early and repeat, so customers can no longer say they didn’t know about the due date. The message comes from the system rather than a particular person, which takes some of the emotion out of talking about money and lowers the risk to the relationship.

Collections now earn money instead of costing it

• Collections used to cost PLN 5,000 to 10,000 a month and now bring in a few thousand PLN a month from interest notes.
• Sunbay took over about 80 hours of manual work a month.
• Some of the cash that was tied up is back in the bank, and customers pay noticeably sooner.
• The process no longer stops when someone is sick, on leave or busy with other work.
• Spending is easier to plan because money comes in regularly.

“Sorting this out went so quickly that not doing it would be the real mistake.”
Krzysiek Romaniak