Salt Silo, a UK supplier of high-purity water softening salt to hotels, breweries, and pub chains, had a cash flow problem hiding in plain sight: its invoices weren't coming back unpaid, they were never arriving at all.
Sent through Xero's domain rather than Salt Silo's own, they tripped spam filters or vanished before customers ever saw them, quietly stretching 30-day terms into 60-plus. By the time founder Jon Murphy tracked down each non-delivery, resent the invoice, and restarted the clock, he'd lost a month of cash flow and an evening of admin he didn't have.
For a scaling, founder-led business, the gap between "invoice sent" and "invoice paid" is the whole game. Salt Silo was effectively financing its customers for an extra 30 days without meaning to, and some accounts were still paying late on top of that.
"We were going from 30-day credit terms to 60 days. And some of those were even paying late after that."
The cost wasn't only cash. As founder, Jon wore every hat, and one of them had quietly become full-time invoice follow-up: sending invoices by hand, dispatching statements one customer at a time, setting individual reminders inside Xero. Every undelivered invoice was another item on a list that kept growing as the business did.
On the surface, this looked like a payments problem. Customers weren't paying on time, so the instinct was to follow up harder. But the follow-up wasn't the issue, and neither were the customers. The real problem was deliverability.
"All of the emails were not going to be coming from our domain name, they were all going to be coming from Xero. We were finding there was a lot of bounces. Emails weren't getting delivered effectively. A lot of customers were saying they just hadn't had the invoices at all."
This wasn't new, either. Salt Silo had hit the same wall with their previous accounting software, FreshBooks, and assumed migrating to Xero would fix it. It didn't, because the root cause followed them: invoices sent from a third-party domain look, to a spam filter, like something other than the business the customer actually deals with. No amount of following up fixes an email that never landed.
The realisation was that Salt Silo didn't have a credit-control discipline problem, it had an infrastructure problem. The fix wasn't to follow up more often. It was to make sure every invoice, reminder, and statement came from Salt Silo's own domain, under Salt Silo's own brand, so it reached the inbox in the first place.
Jon found Paidnice in the Xero App Store while searching specifically for that deliverability fix, reached out, and spoke to Denym.
"Denym said, yep, that's not a problem, we can solve that. And then we saw all the other benefits that came along with that."
The domain fix was the entry point. What it opened up was a complete accounts receivable automation layer sitting on top of Xero, with no migration required: automated sends, timed reminders, branded statements, a customer portal, and policy controls fine enough to handle very different types of customer.
Getting started came down to one onboarding call. Jon is candid that there was a learning curve, but a short one.
"Denym just jumped on a call straight away, had like half an hour, explained everything. That show-and-tell was fantastic, because it enabled us to really understand everything to the finest details. After that, a couple of hours and you feel like an expert on Paidnice."
The core of the setup was policy, not manual work. An invoice is created in Xero, Paidnice sends it the same day from Salt Silo's domain, and a pre-set sequence of automated email and SMS reminders takes over:
The detail that mattered most was control. Salt Silo sells to two very different worlds, and they don't behave the same way:
When one Trust's IT team flagged that calendar invites attached to invoices were triggering their spam filters, Jon didn't have to choose between losing the feature for everyone or losing deliverability for the Trust.
"We were able to just turn that function off just for them. Almost the same policies, everything exactly the same, other than we just didn't send the calendar."
Send timing got the same treatment — weekdays only, staggered through the day rather than all at once.
"We can only send invoices and reminders on weekdays, we don't really operate at weekends. An invoice turning up on a Sunday, certainly in our industry, just doesn't work. If it's not being seen at 9am on the first invoice and they haven't responded, then a second reminder going at 11 o'clock, just having that customisation has been really, really useful."
Statements moved from manual Excel exports to automated, fully branded statements with live links to every invoice, backed by a customer portal where clients can pull their own quotes, invoices, and balances without emailing Salt Silo to dig them out.
For a founder-led business, hours are the scarcest resource, and they were the first thing Paidnice gave back.
"The biggest impact from using Paidnice has really been man hours for me. We're talking five hours already of admin per month, and we're a scaling business. In a year, that could be 15 to 20 hours a month."
With invoices arriving from Salt Silo's own domain on the day they're raised, the silent slide from 30-day terms to 60-plus, caused by invoices that never landed, no longer starts.
The whole invoice lifecycle now runs without manual intervention, and the customer portal removed a recurring source of back-and-forth.
"When the statement comes through, it looks so professional compared to what we were sending before. You can see what's overdue, what's outstanding. I just think it's fantastic."
"It's an absolute no-brainer. It probably costs as much as half an hour's pay — it is nothing in comparison to the hours you'll save."
Jon's recommendation is unqualified, and framed in the terms that matter to a fellow business owner: time versus cost.
"100% give it a try. You don't have to make a decision and sign up for something forever, you can just give it a try. And I'm certain that if anybody did give it a try, they would be sold instantly."
The proof has shown up organically. Customers comment on how professional the invoicing looks, and a close business partner — a water softener installation company also running Xero — has expressed interest after seeing Salt Silo's documents. Jon has gone a step further, answering people in a Xero community forum who are stuck on the exact deliverability problem that first brought him to Paidnice.
"There are so many people out there that don't even realise Paidnice exists. They're struggling with Xero, wondering why their emails aren't getting delivered. So I just put a comment in there mentioning Paidnice, telling everybody: if that's a problem you've got, it will solve it."
Salt Silo is a UK-based distributor of high-purity British water softening salt, serving the hospitality sector, public sector, and commercial water treatment industry.
Request an AI summary of Paidnice
