How Race City Steel is Saving Time and Streamlining Payments with Enmark Pay

Race City Steel, a metal service center based near Charlotte, North Carolina, serves everyone from welding shops to home builders and construction companies across four locations in the Carolinas. Recently, they implemented Enmark Pay, and according to Controller Andrew Minerich, the results have been exciting.

We sat down with Andrew to talk about why they made the switch, how implementation went, and what advice he has for other companies considering Enmark Pay.

Why did you decide to implement Enmark Pay?

We decided to implement Enmark Pay for two main reasons. Number one was the credit card surcharge, and the second reason was to embrace automation.

We’re saving several thousand dollars by embracing Enmark Pay, and that is just to the bottom line.

We also get automation of the automatically applied payments. That reduces a lot of time spent by our staff, having to manually collect payments and apply them.

How have your customers responded to the new payment options?

The overwhelming response from our customers has been positive. Most of our customers have embraced it – even ones that we thought maybe would be reluctant to do so.

They love the online portal. They’re able to go out and make a payment anytime during the day. They get to input their own information, they get to see the amounts, and that means they feel more comfortable with it.

We’ve been able to see how much they’ve embraced this just by the sheer number of payment emails that come in throughout the day.

There were a few minor hiccups early on, but nothing major. With any customer who encountered an issue or question – once we were able to walk through it with them, they embraced it.

How did the implementation process go?

The implementation of Enmark Pay went very well, but any major change in an organization is going to have some challenges of course.

The largest part of the implementation really was training our staff, getting them prepared for it, and getting our sales team prepared for this.

The first two weeks that we had Enmark Pay, we definitely spent a lot more time on the phone, answering emails, fielding calls. But that’s really fallen off, having been in this now for three or four weeks. With hindsight, it didn’t seem that bad at all.

What advantages have you seen since going live?

The primary advantage I like to really highlight as a controller, of course, is saving money. The first week was very exciting for us to watch the money coming in, knowing that it’s offsetting costs that we were previously bearing.

The automatic application of payments is also very good. We have people paying on the weekends, people paying in the evenings. They don’t have to wait for business hours to call and talk to a member of our staff. It frees up a lot of time for our accounting staff and reduces a lot of manual errors.

In addition, and also importantly, I think we are seeing a more rapid collection cycle just because we have more options for people to use to pay.

What advice would you give other companies considering Enmark Pay?

I recommend testing out the payment systems yourself, having your staff try some test payments – whether it be ACH, credit card, or using the terminal in person. Make sure that you understand how the process works.

You will have customers calling you on the phone and they might be frustrated saying, ‘I can’t get this to work.’ And if you haven’t used it yourself, you may be at a loss as to how to help them.

For our implementation, I created internal training materials, including screenshots and slides, so our team could confidently guide customers. I wanted them to be very familiar with everything to help their customers, and I think that preparation was very important.

Now that you have these other opportunities to get prepayment or send out emails requesting payment, you may have to look at those processes and make some changes. It can be a little scary up front, but having gone through it recently, it’s definitely worth it. It will free up a lot of your time for your staff.

The team at Enmark has been a tremendous help throughout this process. No change is without hiccups. But again, they all turned out to be relatively minor after the fact. If it’s a good fit for you, definitely proceed, and the Enmark team will help you.