How Beckoffice provides a payment service without the risk of accessing client bank accounts

Beckoffice, is a London-based independent accounts management firm working with over 100 clients. For 25 years, Beckoffice has supported small to medium-sized enterprises without internal finance departments.

Increasing demand for payments

As an early technology adopter and a perpetual seeker of service enhancements, David Beck, the founder of Beckoffice, identified a need for payment services among their client base. Benefiting both clients and the firm:

“Because we are similar to an outsourced finance team, clients were asking if we could make payments. It’s better for the client than what they normally do, panicking about paying a supplier and sending an amount, rather than by invoice. With us, they know what invoices they’re paying and everyone knows what's going on with a supplier.”

“For us, when we have taken some clients on, where they have an absolute mess in their ledgers because the client has generally paid randomly, or gets a statement from a supplier and double pays. So by making payments ourselves, it helps reconciliation and it’s brilliant.”

Moving away from banking providers

Many clients were already using online banking services with high street banks, so the team would create a payment file out of Xero, upload it to the bank and the client released it. This presented several challenges:

“Not all banks have that facility, and getting people to sign up as a user of the bank system was a pain. It depends who the client was, of course. Some of them are great and they've got it all covered. The other element of it was since the pandemic, everyone's scarpered off home. We had a bunch of card readers and all the bank stuff in the office. So if someone was off, someone was out, someone was sick, we could cover it. But now, if the person who's holding the bank card for the client can’t do it, we can't grab it and cover it.”

“With Telleroo, I can assign multiple people to one client, and we can make payments without having to sign up all our team for clients within the bank. This makes it a little bit easier with the onboarding. Of course you've got to do all your money laundering checks, but once it's all set up, it's a whole lot more flexible.”

Moreover, transitioning from banking providers streamlined the day-to-day operations for both clients and the team:

“If you set up a pay run on the bank and the client doesn't release it and it's expired, you've got to do the whole thing again. Occasionally the client would also request not to pay someone, so you've got to do the whole thing again. With Telleroo, the client can approve whenever they want. And if they decide, I don't want to pay this, they can take it out. For the client, the best bit is they can have a look at the invoice and see what they're actually paying in Telleroo.”

Introducing clients to Telleroo

After signing up to Telleroo, David introduced clients to the new approach to managing their payments:

“Getting clients to change systems can be hard, so you’ve got to dangle a nice carrot in front of them. The carrots were the Xero integration, and showing them how they’ll use the platform. How they’ll be able to look at invoices, and see what the team is suggesting. Then I sold to them the benefit of the ease that various people can authorise pay runs outside the restrictions of their online banking platform . I think I’m relatively at the beginning though, we’ve got a whole lot more.”

Beckoffice began to onboard clients into Telleroo:

“That was simple. Getting other clients on is easy. The Telleroo compliance team is good. You can communicate with them, and they help. You fill out all the details and then it sends an email to the director for verification. Sometimes clients will leave that to later, but again with compliance, I could work with them. With the client’s permission, I could upload their ID. So relatively straightforward, but that's the same when I onboard clients. I think we're all faced with that during onboarding.”

Simplifying bulk payments

Having used Telleroo for a year, David reflects on the benefits of Telleroo’s bulk payments solution:

“I’ve never been comfortable with having access to client bank accounts, and we've had issues. Around eight years ago when there was no dual authority, we were just told what to pay and we paid the wrong account. There was always a risk of paying into a wrong account. So Telleroo is really taking all the responsibility of that payment out of our hands, which is crucial.”

“It's one of the apps that I can see the solid benefits in what we've taken on. It simplifies our life.”