PayStand, the next generation B2B billing & payment company, today announced a number of new solar industry customer wins as businesses have adopted PayStand’s digital payment network to overhaul their receivables. New customers announced today that have selected PayStand to run their mission critical billing, payments, and cash management are: Allterra Solar, Geoscape Solar, Gunthers, and Simplify Solar. With PayStand, these new customers are enjoying the many benefits including: faster time to cash, a frictionless customer payment experience, automation & improved billing efficiencies, and significantly reduced transaction costs.
The Solar Market continues to grow at an incredible pace but is facing huge challenges with margins and business efficiency as the industry matures.
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, solar energy has experienced a compound annual growth rate of more than 60% in the last decade. Today, nearly 209,000 Americans work in the solar industry, energy consumption is on track to hit 80 Gigawatts this year, and in recent quarters, solar has accounted for over 20% of all new eclectic generating capacity.
Toby Corey, President of Solar City during the acquisition by Tesla, noted, “I’ve never been more excited about the growth opportunity in solar and its ability to mitigate climate change, create a steady stream of high-paying jobs, change our economy, and positively affect society”. Corey continues, “While there is much to be excited about in the solar industry, many operational challenges plague the industry. Renewable energy companies deeply need software and technology to help improve their vital operational efficiency and margins.”
Solar industry installers, distributers, manufactures, and power producers are facing increasing cost pressures and competition as the industry grows. Frequently these companies have disparate and fragmented systems in place for their billing and payments that increase the cost of their cash and require high degrees of financial and IT labor. Operationally, these legacy systems often mean solar businesses are taking a combination of extremely expensive credit cards (fees of 3% or more!), manually intensive bank payments, and a staggering number of paper checks that delay cash settlement. Rarely do these payments tie back to the financial systems or the POs/invoices, so manual labor and reconciliation end up introducing needless costs in lost productivity and customer maintenance.
Few solar companies have in place an end-to-end digital process for their cash management: from accounting software, to invoice, to receivables, to payments, to settlement, to reconciliation.
PayStand, a frictionless cloud payment suite helps the solar industry eliminate some of their largest financial challenges in accounts receivables and payables.
With PayStand, solar distributors, manufacturers, and installers, can take payments across multiple channels such as PayStand’s award winning 0% network, as well as echeck bank transfers, and wholesale ach and card transactions all-in-one system. Further, PayStand works directly with invoices, automating financial processes alongside accounting software, and ads powerful management & reporting capabilities.
James Allen, CEO of Allterra Solar notes, “PayStand has been a tremendous asset to our business. I don’t have many partnerships I can trust like PayStand. They helped consolidate our multi vendor billing process, they lowered our transactional costs by 24%, and improved the speed we receive cash by over 2x. Not only that, but it’s nice that our team can pickup the phone and folks over there know us by name.”
After the quick rollout of PayStand, Nathan Silvey, Service Manager of Gunthers said “We found the system easy to use; their invoice buttons and payment portal were quickly customized to our requirements and the custom fields really helped with reporting and reconciliation. Our PayStand checkout is easy for the customer to figure out, especially since it didn’t require them to set up an account. The smooth payment process ensured that clients were not confused at the critical moment when they’re ready to pay or set up a recurring payment.”
Sohail Hassan, CEO of Simplify Solar states that, “PayStand has helped Simplify Solar streamline efficiency in the solar market by not only coordinating payments with our customers but also with our vendors. This helps us achieve our mission to lower industry soft costs typically related to solar.”
Jeremy Almond, CEO of PayStand, concluded, “PayStand’s goal is to bring digital transformation to the legacy financial systems used in commercial payments.” He continues, “Similarly, business leaders in the solar industry are already transforming the energy industry in meaningful ways. We want to continue to partner with them in this 21st century journey by providing them with key digital financial tools that enable more competitive advantages, so solar executives can continue to be successful agents for change.”
