Not Too Good to be True

This may seem a little odd for a blog post, but it is important to understand what we are trying to achieve, how we are doing it, and how we intend to work.

I would naturally be apprehensive about signing up for a free service other companies are charging upwards of £150 a month for. It just sounds too good to be true. So, the purpose of this post is to explain how we work, what we do with your data, and how we intend to make money while keeping your data safe.

Firstly, I just want to explain what data we are using. We take details on your customers, the invoices and credit notes you raise to them, and details of the payments made by the customers. We only use the data held on your accounts receivable ledger (payment dates are held on this), and we do not look at your bank data, creditors, or any other account. We keep copies of all the data taken from your system—if you want to have a look at what we have taken, go to the accounts tab on the right-hand side of the menu and select synced data. If at any point you want to stop using us, you can delete all the data held by us.

What this means is that if you are over your overdraft or late on VAT, we will not know. We only look at your customers, your invoices and credit notes, and payments made on these.

If you are not sharing any data with other suppliers, we will provide analysis, graphs, automated debt chasing, and trade referencing all for free.

But we hope eventually there will be a network built up where you can share data with other suppliers. You should know when this happens, as this will flash up when you look to your Debtor Summary page and on the debtor page for that particular debtor. We have access to the last set of filed accounts, so we can make an educated guess about how much coverage we now have on that customer. It will not be 100% accurate, but should at least give a pointer.

A number of things now start to happen. You will not know the identity of the new supplier sharing data, but rest assured we have checked them to ensure that they are valid. We will then look back up to six years to examine the relationship between your invoices, the other suppliers' invoices, and when they were all paid. We will run various machine learning algorithms over the data to find any relationships that provide a better understanding of when suppliers are paid. The more data we get from more suppliers, the better this will be. From this, we will update our expected dates on when you will be paid for your outstanding invoices.

Once data is shared, we will start providing you with historic debtor days information based on all suppliers, and then overlay your own debtor days with this customer, allowing you to see the customer’s overall long-term payment performance compared to your own. We will show the percentage aged breakdown of the sales ledger, and again overlay your own aged debt over this. We can show long-term and short-term payment performance based on the data we have, and how your own experience compares to this.

We will always be looking for signs of financial distress. By looking at SIC codes, we can identify key suppliers. Now it may be the case that these suppliers always get paid, so a non-essential supplier not being paid could be the canary in the coal mine: why would the customer suddenly stop paying the cleaners if they had no cash flow issues? Any changes that we believe should be brought to your attention will be flagged. However, you will not know any of the invoice details, who the supplier is, or any of the details of the other supplier.

And this is where we come to my final point. We are not a charity, and we are looking to monetize the data. But the data we will be looking to provide will be aggregated data on customers. Your own company name, details, and all those invoice and payment details will never be revealed. You will be part of (hopefully) many suppliers’ data, all aggregated, yet still offering an incredible, live insight into how those customers are performing. We will provide real time credit information on those customers in a way that D&B, Experian and the rest simply will not be able to match. Yes we are ambitious.

There is so much management jargon involving acronyms (KPI, SMART, SWOT) that I am truly excited to name our approach: SMYAISYM, which stands for “Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine.” Or, to put it more succinctly, if you contribute data to the platform, you will be allowed to view the aggregated data of others. You get it for free because you are contributing to the overall data pile, but others who are not contributing will pay. But in all cases, we will keep the raw supplier invoices and payment data and individual supplier names secret.