How MasterPro Lighting Collected 20 Times More Cash in 12 Months with Upflow
MasterPro Lighting is a Miami-based specialist in high-performance, energy-efficient LED systems trusted by hospitals, schools, warehouses, and offices across the United States. And they needed to gain control of their rapidly growing receivables without increasing headcount.
Elisa Rodriguez
Accounting Manager
40 hours
saved per month. Thanks to 500 automated follow up emails sent through Upflow
20 Times
jump in cash collected in 12 months ($33,000 in 2023 to $700,000 in 2024)
2 people
AR team stayed the same, even as sales and revenue increased
Mission statement
MasterPro Lighting manufactures and distributes high-efficiency lighting solutions for commercial and industrial facilities, helping customers slash energy costs and carbon footprints.
FTEs
100
Industry
Manufacturing
Offices
Miami, Florida
Stack integrated with Upflow:
QuickBooks
Challenges before Upflow
Siloed communications left Sales, AR & customers in the dark
MasterPro’s entire order-to-cash conversation lived in scattered Excel tabs, “not even Google Sheets,” Elisa notes. With no shared log, “we didn’t know what sales were being made versus who had sent out invoices versus what were people’s replies,” so credits, cancellations, and special terms went missing and customers got billed anyway.
No single view of balances sent DSO through the roof
Because nobody could see real-time aging, overdue invoices piled up. Elisa recalls “One month we only collected $5,000 when we should have collected closer to $50,000,” and many customers were flagged as instantly late because sales quoted net-45 while invoices went out on net-15. The backlog kept growing until she “was cleaning up a year’s worth of arrears.”
QuickBooks gatekeeping kept data and cash hostage
To prevent accidental edits, QuickBooks was locked down to just a few admins. Everyone else had to “do a deep dive” or ask accounting to run reports. “It’s so easy to mess things up on QuickBooks while you’re just trying to research something,” Elisa explains, so the clamp-down created bottlenecks and slowed every collection call.
Hand-typed reminders consumed days and invited errors
Before automation, dunning meant drafting emails in Gmail and logging each reply in a spreadsheet. Elisa was “constantly glued to her inbox and updating Excel/Google Sheets,” and any customer question paused the entire batch. Clearing the resulting backlog “took about a week,” costing the two-person team precious time they didn’t have.
One month we only collected $5,000 when we should have collected closer to $50,000
Why MasterPro chose Upflow
A QuickBooks integration the IT team could actually bless
When another vendor insisted on a risky “developer-mode” setup that would “void the warranty … QuickBooks makes it very clear, you do not integrate this way,” Elisa’s head of IT halted the deal on the spot.
Upflow, by contrast, connects natively and refreshes every five minutes, “you guys do the integration the correct way,” she says, adding that the clean sync “put my IT guy at ease” and earned his seal of approval.
Email threads that feel like Gmail, not spam folders
“The emails go out, and they come back into a centralized folder. It looks like it’s coming from Gmail, so it doesn’t look like spam,” Elisa explains. With every reply visible inside Upflow, her team no longer pestered her for updates, freeing her from being “constantly glued to my inbox and updating Excel/Google Sheets.”
‘Set-and-forget’ workflows that surface only the work that matters
Upflow’s workflow builder let Elisa create parallel tracks for fresh invoices and old backlog, tune cadences, and sprinkle in manual tasks only where automation can’t help. “I really like the workflows, the customisability and how it’s all automated, but when we need to put manual stuff in there, it pops up as a task I can clear in a minute or two,” she says.
Startup-friendly pricing and white-glove onboarding
Competing platforms either “did not want to deal with us because we were too small or wanted to charge us $20-$30k a year,” Elisa recalls. “Upflow was the only company at a very reasonable price”. That affordability came with hands-on support: “I had a really amazing Upflow representative who sat me down and helped me build the first two workflows from scratch,” speeding time-to-value despite a mountain of legacy AR.
I really like the workflows, the customisability and how it’s all automated, but when we need to put manual stuff in there, it pops up as a task I can clear in a minute or two
Results with Upflow
20 times more cash, same lean team
“The first year they collected only $30,000… since then, we’ve collected over $700,000 in 2024, and I strongly attribute that to Upflow,” Elisa says. “We could not have done it without you guys at all.”
Even as revenue spiked, MasterPro kept the AR team at just two people, proving they could scale collections without adding payroll.
Intelligent orchestration and automation that buys back entire work-weeks
Upflow now fires around 500 personalised reminders every month, emails that used to be drafted one-by-one. At an estimated 5 minutes saved per email, that’s over 40 staff-hours freed per month for higher-value work like exception handling and customer outreach. When a manual step is unavoidable, “it pops up as a task I can clear in a minute, maybe two,” Elisa notes .
Visibility that ends the “black-hole” inbox
Before Upflow, Elisa was “constantly glued to my inbox and updating Excel” just to keep colleagues in the loop. Now every invoice, reply, and note lives in one place, so her team sees updates “without pestering me”. Sales, customer success, and finance now share a live Upflow view of every invoice, promise-to-pay, and note, without granting edit access to QuickBooks. Elisa sums it up simply: “Communication and visibility were our biggest problems, and Upflow solved them completely.”
The first year they collected only $30,000… since then, we’ve collected over $700,000 in 2024, and I strongly attribute that to Upflow
Takeaways for AR leaders
The MasterPro Lighting story proves that you don’t need a big staff or an expensive ERP to control receivables. With Upflow’s QuickBooks integration, flexible workflows, and intelligent email automation, a two-person team:
Multiplied collections 20 times in one year
Kept headcount flat while sales soared
Slashed time spent chasing payments by one full work-week every month
Finance Teams
Say goodbye to Excel, revolutionise your collection processes. Get control of your cash flow.