The Challenge
To consistently produce its Hard Kombucha, Jiant works with a plethora of vendors to source what it needs to create, market, and sell its products. Jiant's small team processes and manages approximately 80 invoices per month from its vendors, but many of its AP processes were executed in Google and Excel.
“The lack of visibility and a centralized system for processing and managing invoices was a challenge since we're a small growing company. The team could not efficiently track conversations around invoices because all related conversions were scattered across tons of emails.” said Aaron, Jiant’s co-founder.
The Solution
“Before Settle we were a young small growing company and largely we still are. At that time we were just starting to get credit terms with our suppliers, net30, and really relying on that for any working capital help. We didn't pursue any bank options, we weren't sure if it was even accessible to us anyways. So, we were running very lean and didn't have a working capital solution and really just relied on Net 30 terms for our supply partners. That meant a certain reality for our business and it made us devote more of our capital to financing working capital and less putting it to other areas of our business, sales, and marketing.
"Settle has made a really meaningful impact on our business, I can confidently say that. It's really been great and I recommend it to anyone I talk to. Why we joined Settle in the first place was that working capital solution. We definitely use it to do the extended payments for invoices.”
Another reason Jiant chose Settle was that the pandemic threw a huge wrench in most omnichannel revenue streams.
“One thing that's happened during COVID is the supply chain has gotten challenging in certain areas. Cans are a great example as there's been a shortage. To help Jiant weather that shortage we've been rather conservative in our procurement meaning we've been buying more cans and taking on more inventory then we otherwise would just to be safe.
Luckily, Settle had our back in sharing some of that burden and that working capital has helped us navigate those waters. In terms of seasonality, we've been growing to the level where there's some seasonality but we have no worries. For a growing company the working capital solution Settle offers is super valuable.”
The Outcome
"2020 we've had 3 full time employees including myself and my co-founder. Now we have 10 full time employees and all but one of them have been on the sales side. Settle has allowed us to really focus on sales and marketing. It freed up resources to hire those sales people.”
