How RingPartner Scaled Affiliate Payments Operations to Success

• Automatically upload invoices and pay affiliates, allowing them to reduce payment time and errors regardless of varying payment schedules.
• Improve cashflow by scheduling payments in advance.
• Reduce time, effort and error by eliminating interaction with multiple banking and payment systems.

HQ Vicotria, BC
Digital Marketing

RingPartner is a “Pay-Per-Call Exchange” that helps small- to medium-sized businesses grow their lead base with phone calls. RingPartner connects live, on-the-phone users who are looking to buy a specific product or service with the businesses that provide those products or services. The RingPartner solution serves industries of all kinds, ranging from locksmiths to healthcare to auto insurance. RingPartner uses Tipalti to:

How RingPartner Cultivates Partnerships

RingPartner uses a network of publishers that send in phone calls through various marketing channels: Google AdWords, miss-dials, radio, print and TV. Those calls are then routed to the end user, namely the service providers that have purchased the calls. This network of affiliates is then paid on a performance basis.

Mike, one of the founders of RingPartner, explains that service providers “don’t pay for anything until they get a call that lasts a certain duration or hits a certain set of key presses on the phone call.” Likewise, publishers get paid a commission for sending in calls that convert. Typically, a converted call pays a publisher anywhere from $2 to $150 each.

Starting out with just three partners, RingPartner has grown to a size of about 30 employees, but they’ve increased substantially in revenue. “We’ve grown revenue-wise, year-over-year about 100 percent,” said Mike.

“I think the big part of the company is the culture,” he went on. “It’s not just the people but the culture that we’ve created and the people who we’ve chosen to work here. It’s something that should be fun and exciting and have opportunities so that people want to come to work.

“By doing that, we haven’t necessarily been super strategic up to this point. That’s something that we’re working on, but we’ve really used that culture and the buy-in from the team to brute-force things to this position. Now that we’re at this size, we’re figuring out what it’s going to take to get to the next level.”

Ringing Up Profits but Running Into Problems

Erin, the RingPartner bookkeeper, explains that one of the problems they encountered as they grew was the amount of time spent on making payments to affiliates and the amount of errors that go along with that. Many of their affiliates want payments through a direct transfer because it saves on time and fees, but previous accounts payable software vendors weren’t able to provide RingPartner with ACH payment solutions.

“There were a number of different services that said they could do it, or banks that said they could do it, but we never actually got to a point where we could do it,” said Erin. “Signing up with Tipalti solved that. That was huge, just being able to do that because we’re a Canadian company and to do ACH is difficult to actually do, but it’s very frustrating for publishers because they just want a direct transfer right into their bank account.

“It would sometimes take me days to send out payments because we had to individually print out all of the checks, then send out paper checks, send out wires and attempt to send out ACH payments and make sure everyone’s information was correct. Then we had to manually put in everyone’s information into the bank. It was a lot of work.”

A Call for a Solution

When Erin started, RingPartner had between 1,500 and 2,000 payments going out monthly. Their payments are now many times that. And affiliate payments aren’t her only responsibility.

“I look after all our account receivables and our account tables,” she said. “I do payroll. I basically look after the money that comes in and goes out. I look after all the reconciliations and do all the work with QuickBooks.”

Because of the cashflow issues that compound when payments coming in and going out are on different schedules (such as Net 7, Net 15 and Net 30), RingPartner needed a solution to free up Erin’s time so she could get to all of her duties and keep partners happy. Without Tipalti, they would have needed to hire another person.

Before using Tipalti’s accounts payable software programs, Erin’s pain point was at an 8 or 9 on a scale of 1 to 10. Now, making supplier payments through the finance and accounting software packages offered by Tipalti, she ranks it to a dwindling 2 or 3.

“I think the best thing is just how simple it now is for us to send payments,” said Erin. “We can send hundreds of payments by simply uploading the CSV. I know that on the date that it’s set to go out, all of our payments will go out.”

Mike says using Tipalti “literally has solved a large problem within the company that we didn’t know how to address.”

Erin can now schedule affiliate payments without the worry of multiple errors. “A lot of our payments go out on Mondays, so I schedule them the week before and upload it,” she said. “Then I just know Monday morning, before I’m even awake, those payments are going out.”