Learn how logistics firm Janel Group receives payments 50% faster than before by using Melio

Meet The Janel Group

Janel Group is a global logistics services company established in New York in 1974. It provides freight forwarding, customs brokerage, and clearance of goods throughout the U.S. and internationally with partners.

Janel seeks to continuously improve its customer solutions, operations, and efficiencies, says Erin O’Leary, Vice President of Technology & Innovation.

“Janel applies technology to facilitate – not replace – the human relationships that give meaning to everything we do,” she says.

The challenge

Janel has been experiencing significant growth in business volumes. “We are trying to improve some of our processes and create efficiencies and better offerings for our customers,” Erin says.

Like many other freight forwarders, Janel uses CargoWise’s platform to automate its operations and works with Chain.io to integrate with the CargoWise platform. Chain.io recommended Melio’s platform to improve Janel’s payment collection process.

“The way we were managing customer credit card information was not the most efficient. We wanted a cleaner process,” says Erin, noting the first step was to provide its customers with a solution to go online quickly and pay.

The solution

Before Melio, Janel had to manually process payments from customers who wanted to pay with credit cards. Now the company has embedded a dedicated URL for payment via Melio in the invoices it issues. “Using Melio created more efficiencies internally for us and cut out redundancies. We don’t have to handle the credit card information ourselves,” according to Erin.

For Janel, it was crucial to be compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards, and so the company wanted to stop collecting credit card information, says Jeannine Morreale, the company’s Accounts Receivable Manager. “Of our customers who have always paid with a credit card, 100% have been moved over to the Melio platform and we have more customers inquiring.”

Melio has saved Janel about 7.5 hours a week in payment processing time and receives payments 50% faster than previously, Jeannine says.

Now Janel is taking the relationship with Melio a step further and integrating the payment platform into CargoWise with the help of Chain.io. “Once the integration is complete we will have a direct link to Melio along with the supporting documentation. This will enable Melio to automatically generate an email containing the invoice, as well as supporting documentation,” says Erin.

Using Melio has eliminated the time spent on correspondence between Janel’s accounting team and the customer support representatives.  Prior to using Melio, payment confirmation entailed too much back-and-forth communication between accounting and customer support.  The redundant steps have now been eliminated thanks to Melio.

“Our customer service staff are already loving it. They have said how nice it was that all they had to do was confirm the URL and everything was immediately taken care of,” Erin says.

The integration with Melio is expected to serve as a pilot for other small and medium-sized freight forwarders to follow suit. According to Erin, the logistics and freight forwarding industry is now realizing how technology can facilitate and improve their internal and external processes. And while many customers will never move away from writing checks, others have wanted to use credit cards but have discovered that many freight forwarders refuse to accept them.

“This has limited what these companies could offer their customers,” Erin says. “With Melio we can easily provide this option to our customers and we see this as an option that will help us grow as well.”

Join the thousands of small businesses across the country who, like Janel, are saving time and money by managing their payments online with Melio.