Overview
Setton Consulting is an IT services and consulting firm built from the ground up by founder Michael Setton. What started as a one-year experiment has grown into a thriving business over 15 years, expanding client by client through referrals and strong technical expertise. Today, the company supports businesses with reliable IT services while continuously improving its financial and operational processes.
Industry: IT Services / MSP
Company Size: 2-10 Employees
Challenge
Growing Pains in Payments and Financial Visibility
Setton Consulting started like many MSPs do: not as a calculated business move, but as an experiment. Michael Setton was an engineer, not a salesman. He gave himself a year to see what would happen. Fifteen years later, Setton Consulting has grown steadily, built almost entirely through referrals and word of mouth.
But through all that growth, one area of the business struggled to keep pace: payments.
Slow, Unpredictable Cash Flow
For most of Setton Consulting’s history, clients paid by check. A few wires here and there, but checks were the norm. The problem was not just that checks were slow. It was that there was no visibility into when they were coming or whether they had even been sent.
Clients would mail a payment without any notification. The team had no way to track it until it arrived. That unpredictability made it difficult to manage cash flow and created unnecessary uncertainty around accounts receivable.
A PSA Switch That Forced the Issue
The real turning point came when Setton Consulting switched PSAs. Almost immediately, their existing payment provider no longer integrated with the new system.
That left the team with a choice: patch together another workaround, or fix the process properly. Setton chose to fix it.
Billing as a Client Experience Problem
What made that decision easier was a realization that reframed the problem entirely. Collecting the first payment is not just an administrative task. It is one of the earliest interactions a client has with the business after signing.
For a technology company, a manual or clunky billing experience at that moment sends exactly the wrong message. The process needed to be simple, clean, and automated from day one.
Limited Reporting and Financial Insight
Financial reporting was another gap. The team was primarily tracking high-level metrics, quarterly profit, annual profit, EBITDA, but lacked the day-to-day visibility needed to manage the business as it scaled. Without an easy way to access real-time accounts receivable data, understanding payment trends or staying on top of outstanding invoices required more effort than it should have.
Solution
Automating Payments and Centralizing Financial Visibility
To address these challenges, Setton Consulting adopted Alternative Payments to modernize its billing and collections process. The platform introduced automation, tighter integrations, and centralized visibility into financial data.
Seamless Auto-Pay
With Alternative Payments, Setton Consulting moved clients onto automated billing through credit cards and auto-pay. The experience became simple on both sides: clients receive an invoice, review it, and if everything looks right, the payment processes itself on the first of the month. No action required.
Integration with QuickBooks and Billing Systems
Integration was a non-negotiable requirement. Setton did not want his team doing manual data entry in the accounting system, and he needed the payment platform to work seamlessly with both their billing system and QuickBooks.
Alternative Payments connected to both without issue, keeping financial records accurate and up to date without any additional administrative overhead.
A Centralized Accounts Receivable Dashboard
One of the most meaningful changes has been visibility. Today, Setton Consulting uses the Alternative Payments platform as its primary accounts receivable dashboard.
What used to require piecing together data from multiple places is now visible in one view. What has been paid, what is outstanding, what is coming in — it is all there without having to go looking for it.
“Here's your bill. Look it over. If everything's good, you don't have to do anything. It'll pay itself on the first of the month.”
Results
A Payment Process That Runs Itself
Since implementing Alternative Payments, Setton Consulting has moved from a fragmented, manual billing process to one that is automated, integrated, and easy to manage.
Payments are more consistent and predictable. The team spends less time on administrative follow-up. And leadership now has the real-time visibility into accounts receivable that was missing for years.
Perhaps most importantly, the client experience at that critical first billing touchpoint is now exactly what a technology company should be delivering: simple, seamless, and professional from day one.
- Eliminated reliance on check-based billing through auto-pay adoption
- Removed manual data entry through QuickBooks and billing system integration
- Improved client experience at the first post-sale interaction
- Centralized accounts receivable visibility into a single dashboard
- Reduced administrative overhead across the billing and collections process
“We essentially use the payment platform as an accounts receivable dashboard. Having that information displayed simply and easily — that's key for us.”
