Automating MSP Payments with FlexPoint (EP 1040)

[0:12] Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast coming at you from Salt Lake City, home of PAX 8 Beyond 2026, and we are continuing with day three coverage here, and got to close it out, find out who the entertainment is for tonight, and see who's going to get.

Introduction and Salt Lake Visit

[0:32] Crazy. But before that, we are going to have another interview here. I have Victor Lopez from FlexPoint in the house, our first time chatting together. Victor, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here. Oh, nice to be here as well. And tell me about your experience. Let me ask first, coming into Salt Lake, first time here? Sure. Yes? No, no, no. I've actually been to Salt Lake three times this year. Three times this year? Yeah, this year. All for conferences? No, I was here earlier in January for snow in Park City, but there was no snow.

[1:08] They have said that this year was a bad year. Yeah, it was a rough year. Yeah, it's very warm. It's beautiful. It's beautiful up there. It's super close to Salt Lake City. And then I was here again in February for a conference. And on my way home, it snowed a lot. Okay. And so my flight was delayed. Oh. So yeah, third time this year for me in Salt Lake. Okay. Now, when you say you came for snow, was it to ski or just to look and watch, hike? Yeah, yeah. It was a little bit of both. I'm not a big skier, but I was with a group of friends. It was like a big milestone celebration type thing. And so most of my friends skied or tried to ski. There wasn't a lot of snow to ski on, but I did go up the gondola. They have this gondola that takes you to the top of the mountains. Really beautiful, nice view. But it was like 55 degrees and sunny, so it did not feel like it was January in the mountains.
Okay 55 degrees and sunny would still be cold in Florida yes yes yes definitely in Florida but, i i live in new York so it's uh 55 and sunny in January weather that's tropical weather yeah for sure all right so flex point.

FlexPoint Billing Basics

[2:15] Well I ll be honest i don't know much about you i do know that you are something to do with billing and payments that's right yeah so, That sounds simple enough but tell us what you do for MSPs that makes our lives easier. Yeah, absolutely. So FlexPoint is an accounts receivable and payments platform. So we specifically help MSPs with billing, collections, payments. And the goal is to eliminate a lot of the manual processes involved in billing, collections, and payments. Okay. And ultimately get paid faster. At the end of the day, it's stupid simple. We help you get paid fast. And that's really what our goal is. Now, do you help with reconciliation of helping us find all of our accounts, where we're missing billings, all of our licenses, that sort of thing? Yeah, so we don't do that side of the house so much in terms of, you know, the reconciliation of licenses and, you know, usage counts, et cetera. But you replace our QuickBooks. We don't replace your QuickBooks. We sit with your QuickBooks and we help like process payments, so credit cards, ACH. We provide a client portal for clients to go in self-service. So a lot of, a lot of the processes that are involved after the invoice is created. So a lot of people talk about like you create the invoice and then magically you get paid. But the reality is there's a lot of steps after the invoice creation that goes into getting paid. Okay.

[3:37] So you obviously do all the credit cards. You mentioned ACH, which is huge right now. Yeah. What is it? E-checks? E-checks. Yeah, that's a fun term.

[3:48] I mean, really, the distinction between E-checks and ACH is not really a big one. I think you also have folks who accept checks and then scan them digitally. But we primarily focus on ACH. And one of the big differentiators of us is we provide same-day funding for ACH. So if someone receives an ACH payment before 4.30 Eastern, they receive the fund the same day. So it's a huge cash flow accelerator. Okay. That's better than my American Express ACH. Yeah.

Flexible Payments and Financing

[4:17] It's better than most. I think we're one of the only ones out there that provide that service. Okay.

[4:24] So I imagine that there's a lot more than just simply submitting an invoice, getting payment. That one of the things that I had looked at with some of the other stuff is the ability to give options for clients, not just options to pay, but for how to pay and over what duration. Do you guys do that? Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to credit cards and ACH, we also offer short-term financing. So let's say a client wants to do net 30 terms. They could do it through the FlexPoint portal. It's non- recourse to the MSP. So client, for some reason, can't, A, that they work through us. And so we do as short as net 30 terms and up to 12 months in terms of length of being able to pay over time. So think of it as, you know, client goes into the portal and decides, hey, like this, you know, this new server that I'm buying 20K or something like that. It's like I want to pay for it over three, six months. They're able to do that through the flexible portal.

[5:21] Yeah, I did. So unfortunately, so I have an MSP and I work with law firms that are always set up in a weird way where they don't want payments. They want to pay for everything. So even my large migrations. Yeah.

[5:38] They'll pay it all. Yeah. But I've only had one time where I did have somebody, it was a very large project, and they asked about spreading it out over three payments. Yeah. At the time, I just said, well, I'll just send you three invoices. Sure. But it'd be nice to be able to just send one invoice and say, look, split it up however you want. And again, it's not a huge part of what we do. A lot of people do, like the core of what we do is really the, you know, the payment automation. But for the most part, it is a very big, you know, value add for folks because it's similar to what you said. It's not all the time, but when it is, it's, you know, it's kind of, it's a big deal. And unfortunately, a lot of MSPs, what they do is they just self-finance. They're like, all right, it's a good client. They've been with me for a while. So, okay, I'll just, I'll just take the rest. I'll buy the server. I'll wait for them to pay me in 60 days. And that becomes a cash flow issue.

[6:31] So I'll be honest, I, I don't even think I've talked to MSPs. I've heard stories of MSPs that do that. They'll extend their own credit and then, you know, get all frustrated when they don't pay.

Collecting Past Due Payments

[6:43] So how does that work with you guys? Now, normally, you know, if there's a credit card dispute, I know I just go to the credit card and deal with that. Do we go to you or do the you go to the customers if they don't pay how does that work yeah so we think of it as a pretty sensitive thing right it's your client's client relationship so we're not going to get into a situation where you know, we're showing up to their doorstep with a baseball bat yeah.

[7:12] Yeah so obviously we have levers in place to collect and we really only loop in the MSP, when we feel like they can leverage their relationship so if generally speaking the MSP is going to know better than us whether hey like because they're having a tough time right now they just lost their biggest customer and so they're going through like a seasonal thing and so that gives us information to be able to better approach it but generally speaking you know we find that, the MSP is better suited in terms of like just a client relationship to understand where you know what's going on and so we try to leverage that relationship but really only when it when we need to for the most part most people you know they're very you know they're very on top of things and they'll be able to make those payments okay, i know you mentioned earlier that ach funding would be same day if they do it early enough what about other funding so for instance if a client does decide that they're going to do you know 30 days or 90 days or even 12 months, i know that there are platforms that will get us all of our money up front and then the platform takes the responsibility of getting the money how does that work that's exactly how it works with flex point yeah so you, we take you get funded next day on the full amount so let's say it's a hundred thousand dollars that the client wants to finance through flex point.

[8:35] You would get paid once the client's approved, you would get paid the full amount, the
$100,000. Based on their, at least their first payment or whatever. No. So it's, it's, as soon as it's approved, you're funded. And then we withdraw the first payment from them. And then every month they provide us payments. All right. So you're taking on a little bit of risk there. We do. We do. But honestly, we're, we're pretty selective in terms of the partners that we work with, in terms of MSPs and like their client base. And so again it's not a huge art of what we do but it's a very important part I d say you know for most parts most MSPs they'll use it like maybe once or twice a year but when they do, use it it's a pretty important thing it's either they're helping out a client that needs some extra time so it ends up being like a really good thing for them because you know generally speaking they'd have to either do it themselves or they'd have to you know not be able to do that upgrade, which we all know, you know, old technologies is a problem.

Pricing and QuickBooks Integration

[9:34] Now I'll share a little bit here about me. So we do everything through QuickBooks just because 29 years ago, I just kept, you know, doing whatever and it was easier and simpler and integrated and stuff. QuickBooks is. Making it tricky to want to stay with them.

[9:54] But one of the things that we always look at is, you know, monthly fees and percentages and stuff like that. And without giving me specific numbers, I imagine that there's going to be something similar to FlexPoint. So one of the things that makes us really, really different about QuickBooks and really any solution in the market is that we don't charge a percentage of processing volume in terms of our monthly fee. So what we what we've seen and really products that were available before we sort of came to the market was a lot of the complaints where hey I m making i grew

revenue 20 and all of a sudden my payment solution I m now paying them 20 more that doesn't seem fair right and so for us, one of the sort of core things of our pricing model is it's a fixed fee every month so it doesn't fluctuate based on what you process so obviously there's transaction fees like credit card fees ach fees you know, they're the fees that you're going to pay anywhere but in terms of our monthly subscription fee it's just a base fee that doesn't fluctuate based on your process, so our highest tier which is unlimited you can process millions and millions of dollars a month it's not going to change every month it's going to be the same fee okay very nice very nice.

Pax8 Marketplace Growth

[11:07] So transitioning back now, you're a Pax A partner. Yep. What's the feedback that you're getting from both existing partners and then new people that you're seeing at the booth? Yeah, you know, it's, this has just been a tremendous event. I've had the opportunity to go to every Beyond since the first one back in Denver. And so it's just, the evolution has been phenomenal. Just like the energy, right? Like so many people here now compared to, you know, two, three years ago. And so for us, you know, we were relatively new to the Pax8 marketplace. We joined in 2024. We continue to be the only payment solution on the Pax8 marketplace. We essentially created the category of the Pax8 marketplace. So there used to not be sort of this operations back office side of the Pax8 marketplace. They sort of created this category for us. And so for us, it's, you know, I think a critical part of the conversation around MSPs. You know, I always say most MSP owners are accidental business owners. You know, you start by fixing the computers, fixing the problems. Then all of a sudden people are paying you to fix these things. All of a sudden you have a business and then you realize, oh, wow, there's all these things that go into running a business. And so we think the category itself has been ignored for a really long time. And so it's a tough category because, again, you're always looking for the least amount of friction.

[12:33] To make things work. And like I said, I just stayed with my solution.

[12:37] A lot of people bolted years ago when they went to the subscription model.

[12:43] Can i absorb it yes do i want to no but in terms of if i were to make the switch or anybody else looks to make a switch they're frustrated with what they're doing now whether it's QuickBooks or Peachtree or.

Smooth Switch and Workflow Fit

[12:55] Any other payment solutions what what's the process to switch over and how seamless is it for us to if we're used to sending out invoices let's say in QuickBooks sure do we still send them out in QuickBooks and then have a gateway or something so, one of the things that we set out to do when we built FlexPoint is make sure there wasn't a ton of disruption in your current workflows.

And so when you asked the question about replacing QuickBooks, I was like, no, no, no, actually, no, we work really, really closely with QuickBooks. And I'll take QuickBooks as an example, because, and whether it's desktop or online, we have the hard book. Yeah, that's a big difference. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so one of the things that we did was we made sure that we didn't  disrupt the workflows that were happening in QuickBooks. So we integrate very, very tightly with QuickBooks. And so whether you're creating invoices in QuickBooks or your PSA, we're able to pull those invoices and then get them to your clients through a set of automation. So automated emails, reminders, and then a portal for clients to actually go and pay the invoices. And then we take all that information, including the deposits, and we send it back to QuickBooks so that your books are correct so like that's really a big part of what we do is making sure everything's synchronized everything's working but i think at the end of the day you know there's a lot of folks like you who are using QuickBooks for a long time that's what you've been using for a long time.

[14:17] And so really what we tell people is like listen this has to work for you it has to be something that gives you additional value it's not an additional step in what we do and what we find is for a lot of owner operators they're the ones stuck with these back office tasks so whether it's the billing right like, you're on the weekend you're creating the invoices for next month it's generally.

[14:41] The owner or an office manager who has 10 other jobs that they do and so what we find is these are tasks that are the highest value because it's the owner's time right these are things that the owners do unfortunately i find that i mean i own a business myself right so i do this all the time fortunately i find that us you know business owners don't value our time in the same way we value our text time or our employee time right it's like oh I ll go and run the invoices you no, that's fine. It's my time. I'm not billing for it. Versus like a tech, it's like, oh, you better, you know, stay efficient when it comes to that stuff. Well, in my case, I've got somebody that starts the invoices. Yeah.

[15:23] They still got to come to me to finish it. And then if something, oh, this person hasn't paid yet. I'm like, oh, okay. Yeah. But yeah, having a process that would take that off of our plates.

AI Agents for Collections

[15:33] Yeah. Not have to worry about it would be nice. Yeah. All right. Any interesting stories at the booth? Yeah, you know, so one of the big things we're excited about this Pax8 specifically is so, you know, we're one of the titanium sponsors, so we decided to make a big investment in this Pax8 Beyond. And that was primarily because today we're announcing the launch of the first AI agents for the back office. And so some of the things you're talking about, right, it's like sitting down and like realizing, okay, so-and-so hasn't paid me in a month. Like, okay, time to make that awkward phone call, I'll pick up the phone and give them a call. So our AI agents, what they actually do is provide these personalized outreach to the clients. So if they're a VIP, been with you for a very long time, obviously high touch, white glove, versus the ones, you know, maybe require a little bit more

firm, more frequent communication. And what's amazing is the agent's able to actually pick up the phone and make a call.

[16:29] It's a very friendly call, just friendly reminder, an invoice is passed due. But what the agent's able to handle is if it were to call you and you'd say, well, what's the invoice for? It can explain in very good detail, including line by line. Say, well, this is Microsoft 365 licenses. You have so many seats, et cetera. Oh, I thought I paid the last one. Well, no, it looks like you haven't. And so what we found specifically around the voice agent it's a pretty controversial concept and so at the booth obviously we have a ton of people coming by you know they're demoing the voice agent we plug in their cell phone have it call them and you know what's been really interesting, is just the variety of reactions to it we have people who are like, how do i sign up this is amazing like i hate doing this it never happens versus other folks who are a little bit more hesitant and they're like, Hmm, I don't know about that. Like, I don't know if I'm going to let my clients, you know, loose on the robots. And so one of the things in, in those conversations that we've, we've learned is, you know, there's a certain amount of trust building.

[17:36] Whether it's payments, whether it's AI agents. And so I always use the analogy of passing on credit card fees. I don't know if you guys pass on credit card fees, but we don't, you don't. Okay. So three years ago, when we started FlexPoint, almost nobody passed on credit copies. They're like, you know, client service, we're not going to pass on credit card fees. It's just not what we do now. It's very, very common. Yeah. I mean, we're considering it. Exactly. And if you're not already doing it, you're at least considering it, which is a huge change from three years ago. I'm telling you, three years ago, the concept itself was like foreign. Absolutely not. So I think that's the thing with AI agents generally, but voice agents specifically, is I think the market is moving so fast. You know, there's so many changes. Six months ago, Claude Cowork didn't exist. You know, three years ago, Claude came out to the market. And so I think the market is moving so quickly. And what we're going to find is our clients are all.

[18:38] Being consumed with AI, whether it's in their job, they're getting called from their doctor's office with voice AI, that eventually it's going to be, you know, it is going to be commonplace. I mean, I don't know why people would be shocked about it. I mean, we get the calls from the doctor's office. Absolutely. Even, you know, they started out as just simply automated messages, but now they're, you know, interactive. And I prefer it, honestly, like I'd rather have an answer to my question faster than waiting. You know, I call Delta, I'm on hold for 30 minutes, It would be amazing if I could get on with an AI in like two minutes and answer, you know, a common question, nothing very complex. And so I think it's just, we're going to see a rapid acceleration there in adoption. The one question that popped up when you talked about the AI agent and, you know, what's the invoice, how much, blah, blah, blah. It's the people that say, oh, I never got it. Can you resend it?
Yeah. Is that an option? Absolutely. I mean, that's one of the core things. That's probably the only thing that I can think of where we've had that. Yeah, absolutely. It's like, oh, I don't think I got it. Let me resend it to you. Which I know they got it because at least even in QuickBooks, I can see it was

opened. And the thing with FlexPoint, yeah, you're able to see when people open and click. Very nice. Very nice. Okay.

[19:52] Anything else? It was a good announcement, by the way. And I did go by your booth. I don't think I grabbed swag off your thing. Come by again. We have our cash flow rules, everything around me shirts. So if you're a fan of Wu-Tang. I don't think they were up front. I thought they were in the back. We had some. Come by. Because I don't, I don't, unless I know you, I don't go back and grab stuff. Yeah, come by and we'll have to do that before I head out there. So, Victor, nice to meet you. Thank you. FlexPoint, folks. So, lots of options. Make the back office work smoother. And that AI agent, that actually sounds pretty cool. Cool. All right. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming by. That's it to do it, folks. We'll be back, I think, one or two more here from PAX 8 Beyond in Salt Lake City. We'll see you soon. Holla.