How Vesta Home scaled to 40–50% more payments year over year

A payment process that required too much follow-up

For Vesta, payment information plays an important role in keeping customer projects moving. Finance needs to know when payments arrive and where they should be applied, while customer-facing teams need an accurate view of payment status when working with customers.

Getting that information often required manual checking in QuickBooks and spreadsheets. As the company added more customers, maintaining an accurate view of payments became harder, and teams outside finance regularly depended on finance just to confirm whether a payment had been received.

Manual work at the point of payment

The payment step itself created extra work for Vesta. Card processing fees had to be added to invoices manually, so a change in payment method could require the finance team to revise the invoice before payment could go through.

For example, if a customer switched from ACH to card, Vesta had to revise the invoice to account for the fee before the customer could pay. That made checkout more cumbersome for customers and left Vesta handling administrative work at the moment a payment was ready to come in.

Collections tracked manually

The same limits applied to collections. Aging reports were pulled and tracked manually, with reporting coming out of QuickBooks. As balances changed, the team had to do extra work to organize outstanding payments and credits by age.

That left finance without a clear view of where collection risk sat, and made it harder to give Vesta’s executive team reliable detail on how collections were performing as the customer base grew.

Why Upflow Payments fit Vesta

Vesta evaluated several options, including Invoiced, BlackLine and HighRadius. The comparison came down to how well each solution fit the way Vesta already operated and whether it could address the payment experience end to end.

Upflow Payments covered the gaps Vesta had identified while fitting seamlessly into its existing QuickBooks setup.

A payment portal customers could use on their own

Upflow Payments gave Vesta’s customers a clearer way to manage payment. Instead of relying on invoice-by-invoice back and forth, customers could use the payment portal to see what was outstanding and choose which invoices they wanted to pay.

This gave customers more control over the payment process and reduced the amount of coordination needed with Vesta before settling an invoice.

Card fees handled at checkout

Upflow Payments also addressed the manual work around card fees. The fee could be passed through during checkout instead of being added to the invoice by Vesta. That meant a customer choosing to pay by card no longer had to wait for the finance team to revise and resend the invoice before completing payment.

Handling fees at checkout also changed the economics of card payments. Vesta now offsets roughly $50,000 a month in card processing costs through surcharging, around 70% more than a year earlier.

A rollout measured in weeks

Vesta was deliberate about testing the payment experience before putting it in front of customers. Even with that level of review, the Upflow Payments rollout, including payment onboarding and KYC, took just a couple of weeks.

What changed after rollout

Payment visibility no longer depended on finance

One of the biggest changes was who could answer payment questions. Sales and customer service previously had little visibility into QuickBooks, so confirming whether an invoice had been paid often meant going through the finance team.

With Upflow, those teams can now check payment status directly, without needing separate access to QuickBooks. They can respond to routine customer questions without waiting for finance to look into the account, while finance deals with fewer internal requests for payment updates.

Collections now run through Upflow

Upflow has become the working system for Vesta’s collections team. Instead of pulling aging reports from QuickBooks and managing follow-up separately, collectors can work their accounts from one place, with the context they need to decide what requires attention.

That has made the collections process easier to run as Vesta has grown. Over the past year, DSO fell from 50 days to 32, a 36% reduction.

Payment volume scaled more than 30x in a year

As Vesta put more of its payment volume through Upflow Payments, adoption grew with it. In Vesta’s first year on Upflow Payments, payment volume increased more than 30x. Over the same period, payment adoption through the portal also grew, from roughly 20% to 35% of Vesta’s total volume.

That increase came alongside broader growth in collections, with Vesta bringing in roughly 40–50% more in payments than the previous year.

Reconciliation became easier

The finance team also saw a difference in the work that followed a payment. Upflow automatically matches each payment to the right invoice and gives finance clear visibility into how payments have been applied, while QuickBooks remains Vesta’s system of record for accounting.

That reduced the manual effort involved in tracking payments once money came in, without changing where Vesta’s books are ultimately maintained.

Would Kenny recommend Upflow Payments?

Asked whether he would recommend Upflow Payments to other finance and AR leaders facing similar payment challenges, Kenny’s answer was an immediate yes.