Wholesail builds accounts receivable automation software for the restaurant industry. Their tools help suppliers streamline collections and accounting while providing seamless bill payments to customers.

Prior to building Wholesail, the founding team spent a collective 50 years working to help over 40,000 restaurants improve their operations with technology. They knew that wholesale trade is particularly painful in the food industry and set out to solve it.

Allowing restaurant suppliers to manage all payments through a single seamless web portal is a critical component of their product and business model. Wholesail makes it easy for their customers to pay, thereby helping restaurant suppliers get paid faster. With Wholesail, they can provide customers a dedicated portal to track and manage all their payments.

Wholesail needs to support three distinct payment and reconciliation flows to make this possible:

1. Enable a restaurant supplier’s customer to initiate payments against an invoice.
2. Allow the supplier to set up a customer on autopay for recurring invoices.
3. Automatically reconcile payments to bank account transactions.

After a year of research, the team was ready to build payments into the product. First they considered building it themselves, but after reading the bank and NACHA documentation, their engineers quickly eliminated that option. The bank infrastructure was too hard to work with, for example, it couldn’t produce the same outcome even if a file was accidentally sent more than once (idempotence) and the risk of double payments was too high.

The Wholesail team considered third-party processors but also eliminated that option. Processing speed is critical in an industry that runs on thin margins, and seven-day timelines would have been a deal breaker for their customers. Further, the team needed complete control of their customer onboarding process, compliance, and transaction amounts.

Modern Treasury turned out to be the perfect fit for their use case. The team got all the customization they were looking for and none of the restrictions. To their delight, it was also exceptionally easy to set up.

When a customer makes a payment, Wholesail uses Modern Treasury APIs to debit the customers bank account and credit the supplier. Since all payments go directly through their bank account, they don’t have to hold on to the customers' funds for too long waiting for the transaction to clear and are able to deposit funds immediately.

“With money movement, you need to know what you are doing. We set things up how Modern Treasury advised, and it went perfectly,” said Eli Chait, CEO and Founder at Wholesail. “It was a simple, concierge service to get onboarded. They helped us figure out exactly what we needed, both with the complicated bank forms and even within their product suite. It’s self serve but not unguided. It was so simple and so smooth.”

Once live, the delightful experience continued. Idempotence wasn’t the only feature that came out of the box. The team didn’t have to build workflow tools for approvals, alerts and notifications, or internal dashboards. A couple times, the team saw failures in their early testing. “As soon as that happened, someone from Modern Treasury was helping us diagnose what had occurred. It saved us hours and hours. Having an expert is so useful. It would have been crazy for us to build this ourselves. We probably got to market 4-6 months faster,” said Eli.

After going live with their Modern Treasury integration, Wholesail has been focused on scale. They even had an early customer express concern about payment timings, and decided to move to same-day ACH.

“With a one-line change in the Modern Treasury API, we were able to meet that customer’s demand”, said Eli. “We saw the impact it had on them and now all our payouts happen the same day. Modern Treasury allowed us to respond quickly to our customers, to delight them, and to bring that to all our users.”

Today, 100% of payments at Wholesail happen through Modern Treasury, and Eli and the Wholesail team can focus on what matters: building their business right.