Schoolies - Bpay case study

This business in the spotlight brought to you by BPAY A: So Matt we're here at Q1 you've got a very interesting business to tell us about. How did you get started? M: A friend of mine, Tony Smith, was playing at the Sydney Swans in the late 80's. They asked him to be traded to North Melbourne, so he decided to open his own business to do end of season footy trips for footy teams, and he thought there might be a good business in finding rooms for schoolies week, and 25 years later here we are at a massive business. Each year we do or handle schoolies bookings for approximately 25-30,000 students. A: Ok, and how has the business changed with the advantage of the internet? M: Going back into the 90's, basically the whole business was over the phone and using Australia Post, which we had a feeling that students would rather book online. We basically got an IT team together and worked out how to do an online booking system which was quite revolutionary back in those days. A: And how do you handle the seasonality through the business? Because obviously schoolies is just a couple of months of the year. M: There are times where we're busier than others so we make sure that the staff are taking their leave in the quiet times, that's one thing. But we do also employ a few casual staff in the really busy times throughout the year. A: So, Matt what are some of the business challenges you faced before you changed payment processing systems? M: We used to get our students to come in and pay with cash, and they'd be queued out the door for hundreds of meters on the big payment days. So there'd be some days where we might have up to $50,000 collected in cash, which you wouldn't want to have a robbery at that time, but also just making sure that it's counted properly, issuing receipts. So once we were able to implement the BPAY solution, it meant that we could say well look there's no need to pay by cash anymore you can use BPAY and everyone was very happy to do that. A: And in terms of the administrative side of things, how much has that changed? M: If you go back say 10 years ago, we have a very busy time around September / October when everyone is paying their final payments for their upcoming schoolies holiday, and previously over a 2 week period we might have 1,000 cheques each day being posted in to us, so with BPAY these days basically the students pay online, and then the next morning we download the file and so that's done in about 10 seconds which previously that might have taken 5 people all day. A: So there's been quite a significant staff saving as well? M: Massive reduction in not just wages but also in doing that much data entry there's errors and once you make an error with someones booking that creates additional work, they ring you , it creates more phone calls, more confusion, so it's certainly been a huge benefit for our business. Visit bpay.com.au/sme for more information