We recently sat down with Mike Messick, Skimmer customer and owner of All Seasons Pools, to discuss his experience using Skimmer Billing to improve his cash flow by requesting, collecting, and managing payments in one place. All Seasons Pools is based in New Braunfels, TX, and services ~210 customers/month.
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Enjoy!
What did you use before Skimmer Billing?
I used the same old software program that the previous business owner had been using since the early 2000's. I'm sure it was state-of-the-art at some point but it was antique by the time I came aboard in 2014. No online capabilities, prone to little bugs and glitches, and hard to search for archived information. No mobile applications to it, either.
What advantages does Skimmer Billing have over the last platform/solution you used?
With our previous platform, you couldn't email an individual bill, much less hundreds at once. I used to have to set aside two or more days (or, during busy times of year, a few late nights) just to print and fold and stuff piles of paper bills. The processing fees for Skimmer Billing are less than what I probably spent on stamps, printer cartridges, office supplies etc. Plus, it's way easier to search and review old invoices, and it's really nice to have the payment processing function integrated instead of needing a whole separate platform just for that.
Before, I had to set aside extra hours to enter credit card payments manually. Now, I can do a billing run in a few clicks and boom, there come the AutoPays and we've got tens of thousands of dollars of income to start off our month. I bet I save myself 20-25 hours a month, if not more considering all the errands for supplies, post office, bank, etcetera. My time is better spent bidding out new work, taking care of customers in the field, fine-tuning the management approach, and learning new things.
What do you love most about Skimmer Billing?
I can't pick just one. Speed, efficiency, convenience, clarity ... plus I feel like Skimmer listens to me as well as I listen to my customers. Much as I like it now, I have a feeling I'm going to like it even better a year or two from now. Which is good, because I'm in it for the long haul.
How does Skimmer with Skimmer Billing help your business?
It’s an absolute game-changer. It inspires renewed confidence from customers, knowing they're not getting skipped or shortchanged. It simplifies things for our team members, everyone can show they're being accountable and getting their job done. If our hard work gets undone by bad weather or other issues we can still confirm we did our job and reinforce the customer's confidence that we'll take care of it. The more I think about what we use Skimmer for, the more I wonder how we ever made do without it. There used to be piles of scrap paper and various spreadsheets and logbooks that got wet or damaged or lost, customer lists and addresses on loose papers, routes that were geographically out of whack, all kinds of messy approaches that got replaced with one platform that keeps the whole team in touch and on task. I'm sure we missed thousands in revenue with labor and chemicals and other little items not being properly recorded and billed. It was harder for my team, it was harder for me, and we all had less to show for it at the end of the day.
If someone were to ask you why they should use Skimmer with Skimmer Billing, what would you say?
The pool business can get really hectic if you've got the number of customers you need to succeed. If you can't take an organized approach to it you're setting yourself up to lose. You don't want to disappoint your customers, you don't want to miss income, you don't want to waste your employees' time, you're working too hard to waste your time and efforts. Skimmer has really helped me and my team make the most out of our work.
