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Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

Tesorio

I looked at them [0] but I don't see anything to do with "get me paid faster" (aka collections or factoring) but they seem to have a "demo wall" to get any meaningful info.

I assume what they do is show you data you already have but maybe don't appreciate fully, e.g. if BigCo pays you on average 30 days late you can see that before you embark on some new project. Cool, but not necessarily getting me paid faster. Helping me avoid risk perhaps.

Maybe I missed it but if you know more, maybe you can give some examples of how they solve this? Genuinely interested since I too have this problem on occasion.

[0] https://www.tesorio.com/

Thanks for the shout-out brianbreslin. I’m co-founder & CEO of Tesorio (YC S15) and in the past I founded a factoring company. Factoring solves the collections problem in a way but it can be expensive and may send mixed messages to your customer that your cash flow wasn’t strong enough to wait for payment. We started Tesorio because we kept seeing folks misuse factoring as a source of financing, not as a point in time solution to a working capital gap. It gets expensive fast, it’s like payday lending for business.

Collections in the B2B world is more broadly defined as the process of reminding your customers to pay you, not so much the breaking knees part. Most companies over $15MM in revenue have at least one person doing this.

We see the collections process as the final step in a good customer experience… so we’ve built a product that combines the best parts of sales CRM and customer engagement tools. Our website showcases our active products (Forecasting, Forex, & Analytics), but we’re currently in Beta with the Collections tool and would love to show you it and get your feedback.

Feel free to reach out to me directly: carlos[at]tesorio.com

All great points, and to the meta discussion here of whether ideas are sufficient, I think you just demonstrated that ideas need experience and experimentation more than they need funding :)

That said, I think the fact that some folks misuse factoring in some industries doesn't mean it cannot be correctly used by many folks in other industries, even alongside other capital sources. Lowering the expense could be one way to innovate. Reducing the chagrin factor could be another.

FWIW, I have been at several >$15MM tech companies and in most cases worked directly with the CFO and team, and I don't recall having a FTE doing collections in any of them; sure it was a problem on occasion. The bigger problem was the routine elongation of the receivables cycle. We got paid in full 99.99% of the time - but slowly. We didn't need collections, we just wanted cash faster. Even at >$15MM...in fact more so!

Reminding them wasn't the problem in my experiences - though I'm sure there are many who have this problem - they deliberately engineered delay into their system. They were rewarded to delay. I have been on the other side of that table, doing the exact same thing admittedly, so I know.

Would love to chat 1:1 too, just keeping the ideation here on the thread in the spirit of the OP's goal.

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