According to the market research firm, IDC, organizations lose up to 30% of revenue each year because of inefficient processes. So, it naturally follows that if you want your business to thrive, you need to automate your processes.
Mauro Cretari of CIO Landing Inc. is a self-described Automation Freak (he's so passionate about it, it’s in his LinkedIn profile😉). His main goal is to help his clients improve their business processes. To do that effectively, though, he first needed to address some of his company’s processes. As he puts it, “we had a bottleneck. Our financial department was doing billing reconciliation manually. It took a lot of time. We’re human, and sometimes, we make mistakes. That was the main reason why I was interested in the Gradient solution.”
Before Gradient flew to the rescue, Mauro turned to some other solutions. His company built an integration to work with their PSA, they created custom scripts and ran them every month in order to capture and bill for all products and services. Unfortunately, that method was untenable. It was tedious, time-consuming, and definitely not scalable. It required constant upgrading and rewriting for new integrations and new tools. And when things went wrong, as they sometimes do, he had to fix them himself.
Mauro realized that Gradient had already developed a tool that met his challenges, and he didn’t need to do it on his own. According to Mauro, “I liked the way Gradient treats its partners. I like that they understand the needs of MSPs and work with them on finding solutions. As for the Gradient Billing Reconciliation Module, it already integrates with many of the tools we use. I saw the potential of cutting down on a lot of hours that my finance department was investing in billing. I need people working on developing new integrations not working on something that has already been done.”
Before discovering Gradient Mauro considered some other options but found them to be too expensive. As he puts it, “It takes you three months to make the tool work perfectly. After three months you get an email telling you about a premium feature that cost $500 more. You have two options, either pay five times the initial fee or you must redo all your processes again. I much prefer Gradient’s straightforward pricing.”
Mauro’s first impression of the Gradient Billing Module was very positive. He immediately saw the tool’s potential. He was so impressed that he was easily able to ignore a few idiosyncrasies, and as an early adopter of other software, he was also predisposed to dealing with a few bumps along the way to perfection. (After all, even Microsoft must fix bugs in its software before perfecting them.) The important question for him was customer support. How responsive is an organization in providing support to its customers?
We’re pleased to note that Gradient’s support team rose to the occasion. Mauro felt that they “kept him in the loop” and provided helpful updates and roadmaps.
After some time using the tool, he continues to be pleased with the results. “You made my controller happy and that’s not easy. Prior to using the Gradient Billing Module, he was using Excel. Sure, he saved $100 per month but the cost in time negated the savings. When I showed him the tool and showed him that it was basically three clicks to update the numbers, he saw the value right away. Instead of taking four hours per month, it takes one hour.”
The main benefit of Synthesize™ Billing according to Mauro is that his company no longer leaves money on the table, and he gets a much more accurate view of his finances.
“Without the tool, I have no way of double-checking if our finance department is billing what we’re supposed to be billing. Now I can audit things easily without spending a lot of time on them. For me personally, the biggest benefit is that I can focus my time and energy on things that help grow my business.”
And at the end of the day, automation is what makes that possible. In this case, automation in the form of the Gradient Billing Module.
Check it out for yourself. It can do for your company what it’s doing for CIO Landing Inc.—it can help take you to the next level.