Better Trucks Saves Time and Money by Switching to Branch for Same-Day Pay

Better Trucks is a regional last-mile delivery company with a diverse set of customers, ranging from some of the largest e-commerce brands in the U.S. to highly-specialized, perishable and subscription-based food providers. Founded in 2019, they’ve grown rapidly over the past several years as the demand for expedited delivery services expanded.  

Mike Koleno is the Chief Technology Officer for Better Trucks, and has been with the company for four years. We spoke with Koleno about what made Better Trucks switch to Branch from their previous payments provider, and how making the change has helped their business save time and money while continuing to scale. 

Pre-funding and ACH: Outdated Methods Causing Operations & Administrative Headaches 

Because Better Trucks knew that same-day payments were becoming a must-have for gig platforms, they didn’t shy away from offering a fast payments experience to their 1099 drivers right out of the gate. However, prior to using Branch, Better Trucks initially used a different payments provider to help them deliver same-day pay. Unfortunately, their previous platform came with a few administrative headaches.

One of the biggest issues was the tight ACH timeframes that Better Trucks needed to submit payments within to get drivers paid each day, since their previous provider relied on ACH to send payments.

“If you missed an ACH window and cut-off time, you wouldn’t be able to move that money until the next window opened,” Koleno explains. “For example, you had to make sure on a Friday that you moved enough money on Saturday, because there is no Saturday night ACH window.”

Their previous provider also required them to pre-fund an account multiple times per week, which is less-than-ideal in an industry where cashflow is paramount. 

"[Pre-funding] creates interesting hoops to jump through to ensure successful payments to drivers. We want to keep as much cash on hand to pay for all other aspects of the business," says Koleno. "Cash flow is important when you're paying people every day for services that you're only collecting payments from shippers every quarter."

In addition to these hassles, the cost of their previous provider wasn’t something they felt was sustainable if they wanted to grow their driver pool and properly scale their business. 

“There was a baseline cost of $15,000 a month in transaction fees. We were scaling fast, and the fees would have simply become too much.”

Koleno and his team knew that if they wanted to scale, these payment issues couldn’t persist. 

“It became a fairly large effort to manage the money moving in and out,” says Koleno.

Switching to Branch for Hassle-Free Same-Day Payments

One of the unique things about Better Trucks is that from their inception, they realized the volume of opportunities in the gig economy and how they’d need to create a compelling experience for their talent if they wanted to stay competitive.

“We wanted to tap into the power of the gig economy and to do that, we knew we had to make everything as frictionless as possible for our drivers,” says Koleno. “That included the most important aspect: getting them paid.”

It was becoming clear that to accomplish this, they’d need a more seamless same-day pay provider—one that didn’t require them to deal with ACH cut-off times, pre-funding, or excessive fees. 

Koleno and his team had heard of Branch previously, but it wasn’t until one of their investors recommended Branch that they made the change. In implementing Branch, Better Trucks can now offer drivers same-day pay without having to jump through hoops to make that happen, since Branch does not rely on ACH. 

“The goal in using Branch was to ensure that if a driver signed up to do deliveries with us on any given day, that they would be able to complete their deliveries, check out at the station, and by the time they flipped the keys in the ignition on the way home, the payment for that day’s delivery route would have already hit their bank account,” says Koleno. 

Plus, switching to Branch meant that Better Trucks could say goodbye to the hassles of pre-funding, since we float businesses the money to pay out their workers, eliminating the need for a separate account and additional cashflow monitoring headaches. 

And without those transaction fees, Koleno notes that with Branch they’re saving upwards of $40k per month given how much they’ve grown. 

“Since we grew three and a half times over the course of the last year alone, and two times the year before that, if we were still using [our previous provider] we’d be writing a check for $40k a month for transaction fees alone,” says Koleno.

Not only have same-day payments with Branch saved Better Trucks money on fees, but they’ve also saved them a considerable amount of time since they’re no longer working around ACH windows and dealing with pre-funding. 

“I’d say we’re saving anywhere from 6-12 hours a week on accounting work,” says Koleno. “And it’s eliminated all the angst associated with working around those ACH windows as well. “

Fueling Future Growth With Fast, Flexible Pay 

Koleno credits the switch to Branch with helping them continue to scale for the future, since the no-cost platform doesn’t bog down Better Trucks with transaction or other fees in exchange for a seamless same-day payments experience. In addition to saving Better Trucks time and money, Koleno has also been pleasantly surprised at the optionality and flexibility Branch offers their drivers.

“One of [the] many benefits of Branch is that once that money leaves our world and is in their Branch account, there is a world of options that the drivers have. We don’t field any kinds of calls—if people want their money right away, they can get it. If they want to move it over to another account, they can.”

Koleno and his team also mention how smooth the onboarding process was—and that longtime drivers have appreciated how seamless the transition has been while switching to Branch. They’re impressed with the fact that payments are processed to their Branch accounts without delay, and that our support team has been helpful and responsive.

Koleno was pleasantly surprised to see some drivers already had existing Branch accounts from other jobs. 

“We had a small contingent in the beginning who were already familiar with Branch, and that was a welcomed surprise. And those numbers continue to grow based on the amount of time we’ve been working with Branch,” he says, noting that it’s common for drivers to work for multiple platforms at once as part of the gig economy.

Overall, switching to Branch has enabled Better Trucks to deliver on their mission of providing a fast, frictionless payments experience for their workforce—opening the door to even more growth and opportunities in the years to come.