Alongside this year’s Silicon Gorge: Autumn Edition we’re publishing profiles of a few of the companies that have made it through to the heats. This week it’s Bristol-based automated credit control business itsettled.
Here to answer our questions is itsettled CEO Glen Morgan.
What does your company do?
itsettled is a credit control app that allows SMEs to automatically collect payment on invoices, making the process professional, quick and stress-free. We provide a legally compliant collections process for a fraction of the cost of employing someone. Available in three different packages, it can be integrated into accounts software or used as a stand-alone system.
What problem are you trying to solve?
The most common problem faced by our customers is also our entire reason for being. Research has shown that UK small and medium businesses are owed as much as £50bn in late payments at any one time, with the situation only likely to get worse in the current climate.
It’s absolutely shameful that small and medium businesses, who make up over 90% of all businesses and represent three fifths of the employment in the UK private sector, are failing because they’re not getting paid for work they have completed. This has to stop and we’re on a mission to do something about it.
The goal is to help over 30,000 businesses to get paid over the next five years. And we want to halve the outstanding amount owed to UK small and medium businesses at any one time from £50bn to £25bn.
What makes your solution unique?
We’re the only UK app that is fully automated to assist with the credit collection process.
We’re also the only UK credit control software business set up by experienced credit management professionals, thanks to Glen’s status as a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Credit Management. And, finally, we’re using a tried and tested process that’s enabled our sister company, Credebt, to recover more than £350m for businesses in the last 11 years.
What are you most proud of so far?
This may seem like a strange answer, but I’d say we’re most proud of our previous failure, as it helped us to get here. We’d gone through a lot of pain to get an early stage version of the app together last year. We’d started to get a few customers signed up, with more in the pipeline. But it just wasn’t what we wanted it to be. The partners we were working with just didn’t “get it”. And the whole thing was becoming rather frustrating. So we took the painful decision to go back to square one.
At the time this felt like a failure, but now we’re in a much better place because of that.
How much are you raising and what do you want to use investment for?
itsettled is looking to raise £750k. This will be used for staff, digital marketing, advertising and further development of the App and integrations required for it to work seamlessly with other systems.
It will also be used to further develop our partnerships, many of which are at advanced stages of development already, but require money spent on legal agreements, licenses and working capital while trials are carried out, before launching to the wider body of membership with our partners.
What tools/people/services/organisations helped you most?
In early 2020, itsettled was granted a place on the NatWest Entrepreneur Accelerator, both for the Bristol Hub and Nationwide Fintech cohort. This gave us further impetus and helped to open doors more quickly than we’d have been able to on our own.
The Accelerator provided us with so much support and development including networking, training and mentoring. But more than anything, we benefited from being part of a community of like-minded individuals all aiming high and helping each other to achieve their goals, both professionally and on a personal level.
NatWest helped us to gain confidence and open doors which led to us securing interest from major banks, invoice finance providers and accounting software firms, as well as being convinced that our goal to help 30,000 businesses over the next 5 years was realistic.
Where can I find out more about you?
Visit our website www.itsettled.co.uk Or email either of our founders:
Jonathan@itsettled.co.uk
Glen@itsettled.co.uk
