Does anyone enjoy parallel parking?
I remember having a car in the city. My job was out in the suburbs so every evening I’d leave the office, sit in traffic for an hour (sometimes longer), and then drive around the streets of Chicago searching for a parallel parking spot. A lot of times I wouldn’t even step foot in my apartment until two hours after leaving the office.
And then came the winter. In the morning, my car looked like one of those in the picture above. I’d spend 30 minutes shoveling, scraping, and wiggling out of a tiny parking spot.
Then it was off to the morning traffic jam. Work. Another traffic jam. Parallel parking. Do it again tomorrow.
In those days, I wish I could have handed my keys over to someone like a valet driver and they would park the car for me. For a little extra money, they would come by and shovel or scrape off the windshield in the winter. And, for the “Deluxe” package, they would double as an Uber, driving me to and from work. With the free time, I could sit in the back seat and work, or read, or take a nap.
Looking back on it, I wonder how much I would have loved this type of service. How much happier I would have been if this was just taken care of for me.
What’s the “parallel parking” part of your job?
When we talk with owners, CFOs, accountants, bookkeepers, Accounts Receivable reps, they share with us a lot of the “parallel parking” and “shoveling the car out” tasks of their job. These are remedial things like creating and sending invoices, following up with reminders, and collecting their owed money. They say that Quickbooks and Xero make it easier than doing this all manually, but those are systems and it’s still hours of repetitive tasks week after week that are the true pain. They are frustrated because the process is inefficient, time consuming, and the entire time wish they could focus on other tasks and work that drive the business forward… like getting more clients, raising money, recruiting, or anything else.
I think of those softwares like having a Mini Cooper instead of a pickup truck; it may be easier to park but you still have to spend the time driving around finding an open spot. You still have to shovel the car out yourself.
When customers implement FinanceFuel, they have an expert here doing the needed tasks for them. After a week or two of having this in place, our customers tell us, “Wow, I can’t believe how much time I have back in my day.” Or we’ll hear things like, “I knew I wasn’t the most effective or knowledgeable about processing Accounts Receivable, but I didn’t realize how much more efficient this could be,” or “You helped speed up our A/R so I did not have to use my line of credit.”
With the extra time in their week, they have taken on higher impact projects and feel confident their AR is being processed efficiently
But then the question becomes, “Is it worth the price?”
Back to that parallel parking example from earlier, my younger self probably would have said, “Yeah, it’d be nice, it’d save me time, but I don’t have the extra money for it. I’ll just keep doing things the way I always have.”
When you look at the Accounts Receivable comparison though, FinanceFuel is a fraction of the cost of hiring someone (+benefits) or hiring a bookkeeper/accountant. We built the tools to process AR lightning fast, while leveraging AR experts to bring the human and personal component. This enables us to be highly efficient and cost effective. Re-allocate your time (or your teams) to focus on bigger projects and put hours of time consuming AR processing time back in your pocket.
With FinanceFuel, you have the easier way to do things, the less expensive approach, and the confidence knowing that it will all get done correctly.
The only real question left is: Do you enjoy parallel parking?
Or do you want someone to do it for you?
FinanceFuel accelerates a business’ cash flow by speeding up Accounts Receivables. We remove the remedial processing and collection tasks so employees can focus on high-value work driving the business forward. You can learn more about FinanceFuel on our website or, if you’re interested in speaking directly with a member of our customer success team, send us a note (sales@financefuel.co) and we’ll get back to you right away. Thanks for reading the blog, we’ll have regular content up on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
