All about
At the end of the day, Plastiq is a “cash flow enablement” company. They have two main products for Ecommerce merchants:
- Plastiq Pay manages outgoing payment, and
- Plastiq Accept, which is for accounts receivable (which we will outline more in a separate listing).
To get started you are going to link all of your banking and credit card accounts. They will show you upcoming bills, cash flow, and accounts payable. *For larger companies they enable approvals to make sure the boss is approving spending by the employee.
They have an invoice inbox that can take all of the invoices coming into your email, send them to Plastiq, and import them into Plastiq. You can even set up auto-forwarding rules in Gmail/Outlook/etc., to forward or cc their email address, and that will automatically import the invoice, at which time they use a reading tool to calculate the amount due, invoice number, bill date, due date, etc.
Within their invoicing tool you can change the amount you’d like to pay, in case you’re looking only for a partial payment. Plastiq will automatically charge your bank account, and create and send out the check.
They will fully process and track the status of all checks and payments. When you issue a payment, the vendor is going to receive an email so that they can track the status of the payment.
If you want to pay a bill with your American Express credit card, and the vendor doesn’t accept it, no problem. Plastiq is the black box in the middle that makes sure you can pay with what you want to pay with, and the vendor will receive what they want to receive with.
They have reasonable credit card processing fees, starting at 2.85%. And this will often buy you 30-45 days of cash flow on that payment. The number one use case is paying Facebook by credit card, Facebook will take it as an ACH, you are paying that credit card fee, but you’ve secured 45 days of cash flow.
Stack Plastiq with your existing Ecommerce credit card and you’re going to get additional points and cash back, so that 2.85% fee gets kind of “reimbursed” down to something lower (depending on the points/rewards system from your credit card provider).
They have additional short-term financing options which can even further extend your cash flow. So say you choose a 60 day financing option (which will come with additional fees, which vary based on your stats/revenue/etc.), you’re actually getting 60 day financing on top of your 45 day financing, and then when you pay off the transaction, you can pay it with a credit card, getting you another ~30 days of financing, which in total gets you 135 days of financing at a very low rate (because remember you are also getting points back when you put it on your credit card), so all in all, nearly half a year of cash flow could be opened up with just a few clicks.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
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Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Merchants may be paying thousands of dollars in fees to say a company like Bill.com, this replaces their system with something a lot simpler and more cost-effective.
They also are monitoring for fraud and will be able to flag and review any fraudulent activity.
The number one metric Plastiq is improving is working cash flow, which enables you to deploy more capital, get inventory faster, spend more on Facebook ads, etc., which contributes to the growth of the company.
They also really streamline the invoicing process, saving your CFO or accounting team a ton of time.
Depending on the size of the company, the person involved in onboarding Plastiq will implement the change. For smaller organizations, it may be the CEO, CMO, or COO, whoever is most closely involved with cash flow and finances. For larger companies, it can be the director of accounting, controller, CFO that is making the final decision, and it could be the head of merchandising or even an internal advisor that becomes an advocate for Plastiq, simply because it improves cash flow and makes their job easier.
For larger accounts, you’ll get hand held through the setup process. For smaller brands, you simply sign up, login, connect accounts, and boom you’ve got a Plastiq account.
The overall setup process is only going to take 15 minutes or so. Your finance or executive team may go into the tool regularly to check on payments and cash flow, etc. Overall this tool does not require much more than 15 minutes of maintenance a month, typically done by finance/accounting, or just automatically integrated into your finance tools.
Plastiq can be used for brands big and small, you can absolutely start from day 1 and utilize them for improved cash flow right from the start.
Larger brands can add Plastiq into their stack whenever they want, especially whenever they are in need of improving cash flow.