An easier way to pay

Instead of chasing down customers to collect payments, Marrone Lawn Sprinklers expanded its payment options by bringing the billing process into the mobile age.

“We were waiting for checks constantly, ending the year with a lot of money on the street,” says Tom Marrone, who’s working with his father, Mark, and brother, Joseph, to transition the irrigation company into the second generation. “My sister-in-law and I spearheaded a way to collect money a little easier.”

After comparing several online credit card processing systems, the Marrones implemented PayPal last year. This small addition has drastically improved their collection rate and has streamlined the payment process.

“People aren’t taking the time to print out an invoice, write a check and mail it.” Tom Marrone, operating partner, Marrone Lawn Sprinklers

Free to set up and simple to use, PayPal enables the company to securely process credit cards and PayPal payments online with nominal fees of 30 cents plus 2.9 percent of each transaction.

Simultaneously, the company rolled out email invoices that link to PayPal. Each service truck was also equipped with an iPad and a mobile PayPal card reader to process payments in the field.

Marrone outfits all of his company’s service trucks with everything needed to process payments in the field.

To introduce the new payment options, Marrone’s team notified customers through multiple channels. “When somebody calls into the office or when we’re face-to-face with customers, we say, ‘Here are your options for payment: You can hand us a check or you can go online and pay through our website. We can email your invoices and you can click on the link and pay,’” Marrone says.

Some customers, particularly elderly ones, still prefer to receive invoices by mail and pay with cash or checks. Marrone’s younger customers seem more apt to opt for email invoices and online payments.

“About 40 to 50 percent of our invoices are emailed now, and most of our emailed invoices get paid through PayPal,” Marrone says. “The younger generations do everything online. People aren’t taking the time to print out an invoice, write a check and mail it. They just want to click a button and be done with it.”

PayPal also saves on the postage, paper and time it previously took to stuff envelopes and deposit checks. Most importantly, it achieves Marrone’s initial goal of increasing collections.

“It made it much easier for people to pay us and it improved our collections exponentially. Twenty percent more of our fall sales were collected by Jan. 1 than when we didn’t use PayPal,” he says. “Out of the 40 percent of customers that have started using it, 5 or 10 percent weren’t paying us in the first place.”