Victoria roastery Sixpence Coffee is driven by a love of coffee beans, not bean counting. So a day of chasing customer invoices is not top of their list of inspiring reasons to bounce out of bed. Production manager Tim Dickens says with pre-payments in Upstock it lets his wholesale customers pay upfront, which has virtually ended the dreaded hours of invoice-chasing and stressing about the risk to the business.
“Every month the number of statements we’re issuing seems to be getting less and less. So there’s a real positive result there. It's never nice to receive an invoice or a statement with a big red ‘overdue’ at the top of it. It's never nice sending those things out either.”
Tim says since setting up Upstock’s pre-payments he’s noticed a sharp fall in bad debts. It’s also given them a lot more visibility over which parts of the business are most profitable.
“It’s given us recognisable income streams. Now it's so much easier in terms of reporting and knowing where certain income is coming from. Upstock pre-payments let us see exactly how our wholesale business is going, compared to our retail and our online.”
It's also made life easier for Sixpence’s wholesale customers too.
“It’s given our customers the ability to manage their own finances and avoid an arduous onboarding process.”
In addition to their roastery, Sixpence has cafes in Bright, VIC and Albury, NSW. Upstock has also massively improved how they do stock transfers between their retail outlets.
“What used to take 10 to 15 hours a week is now 15 mins at the end of the month. Having ordering, pre-payments and stock transfers all in one place on Upstock, I can’t stress how much that’s made life easier for everybody here.”
More from our chat with Tim from Sixpence Coffee
Tell us about your business, customers and your brand?
We're a small-scale coffee roaster based up in the high country in Bright, Victoria. We have about 50 wholesale accounts and we sell our coffee at our own cafes located in Bright and in Albury, NSW too. We're all about sustainability. We always make sure that we are sourcing our products from people that we trust and know. And that follows through everything in our business; working with people that we can get to know. As far as our shop goes, well pretty much every single local in town comes through here daily. And then Bright being the tourist destination that it is, gets super crazy over summer and in winter we have all the snow traffic. As far as our wholesale customers go, we work with a lot of smaller, higher-end cafes around the Northeast in; Wangaratta and Albury, Wodonga. We're really committed to having the best customers that we can, making sure that all of our education for them is as top-tier as it can be and making sure that we can help them do the best for our product.
Why did you start using Upstock?
We were having all sorts of issues with the randomness of ordering and we wanted to find a really solid system to work in a more manageable way. We tried to sort of jump in with Upstock on the ground level when it started. Before that we would receive orders in any number of methods; emails, text messages, phone calls. Now there are no more 3 AM orders or people forgetting to do things. So yeah, Upstock’s fantastic!
You’ve got cafes in Bright, Vic and Albury, NSW, as well as a separate roastery. How has Upstock improved stock transfers between sites?
Before we would be doing manual invoices between the roastery and our stores. It just wasn't traceable at a glance, it was so much more convoluted. Having stock transfer as part of the same process has allowed us to really streamline our actual physical processes in the roastery like packing and sending orders. And then having it all tally together at the end of the month for us has been so handy as well. We used to take 10 to 15 hours a week to sort out stock transfers, now it’s 15 mins at the end of the month. I no longer feel like I'm tied to the computer for half the afternoon.
See all the benefits of Upstock for coffee roasters
See all the benefits of Upstock for cafes
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