Beer Thirty Shop & Pour House Wins with Deluxe Payment Exchange

The Client

After a surfing accident left Shawd DeWitt unable to continue working in the family surfboard fin business, his wife, Kym, was determined to help him find his new passion. Already the CFO of a beer distributor, Kym saw an article highlighting a New York town that had eight of the top ten craft breweries in the nation.

“Craft beer was just beginning its boom at that time,” said DeWitt. “Our timing was perfect.” The DeWitts teamed up with two business partners to create Beer Thirty Bottle Shop & Pour House in Santa Cruz, CA.

The Challenge

As a small business, Beer Thirty faced a common business challenge: “We run a very tight ship from a staffing standpoint because we are in the food and bar industry," DeWitt shared. "We have minimum wage employees and that means we, as owners, have to wear a lot of hats and pick up the slack on a day-to-day basis. If an employee doesn’t show up for work, or if they want to go on vacation, we’re filling in … and sometimes that means our accounts payable go by the wayside.”

Further complicating things for the DeWitts, California law prohibits the delivery of alcohol if an invoice is more than 30 days past due. To guard against missing a delivery, the DeWitts began leaving signed checks behind the bar.

“That was certainly not a comfortable solution for us to leave our bank account open like that,” said DeWitt. “We needed an immediate method to get a check into our vendors’ hands.”

The Solution

“We knew there had to be an easier way to do what we were doing," DeWitt said. "We use QuickBooks® and I did a quick app search." Her search uncovered Deluxe Payment Exchange.

“eChecks are the same thing as a paper check that you’d receive in the mail,” says DeWitt. “You just deposit it the way you would a normal check.”

Fully integrated with QuickBooks®, eChecks allow a business to schedule all of its payments and then email the ePayment at the most opportune time.

“I literally signed up, sent someone a check and was like ‘Whoa, this is life changing, this is a miracle.'”

The Impact

Since signing up with eChecks, DeWitt estimates that the amount of time she’s spent on accounts payable has dropped 90 percent.

“The bill comes in and it gets entered — I don’t think about it," DeWitt shared. "And my vendors are absolutely impressed. They’re like, 'Wow, these people know what they’re doing because they’re showing me something I’ve never seen before.' I don’t have to hire an outside accounting firm. eChecks are probably saving us $200,000 per location.”

Equally important is that since adopting eChecks, they no longer miss vendor payments.