Facilities management has a structural cash flow problem baked into the business model. Clients pay on net 60 to 120 day terms. Vendors, many of them small owner-operated businesses, expect payment in 30 days or sooner. The gap is always there. Growth makes it worse.
For Maintera, private equity ownership removed the usual safety valves. No owner capital to draw on in a pinch. Debt on the balance sheet tightened working capital on both sides. Accounts receivable performance stopped being an operational inconvenience and became a business-critical function.
The problem was that Maintera had never run a formal collections process before. With 200 invoices going out every day and $11 to 15 million in monthly receivables, follow-up was left to chance. AR was slipping, working capital was shrinking, and without visibility into how customers actually paid, they couldn't price new contracts accurately. Aaron Lynch, the company's Director of Finance, was personally flagging overdue accounts from his own inbox.
Aaron's choice came down to responsiveness, simplicity, and value. He had looked at other platforms, including PhaseShift, but found them egregiously expensive and difficult to use. Building a custom NetSuite script was the other option on the table, but the cost, maintenance burden, and performance degradation it would cause made it a non-starter. Daylit stood out immediately on ease of use.
For a business where collections are mission-critical, the economics made sense too. But what sealed it was something harder to find: a vendor that actually listened. As an early-stage company, Daylit turned around feature requests at a speed Aaron hadn't experienced elsewhere.
That combination of simplicity, affordability, and a genuinely responsive partner made Daylit the clear choice.
Maintera, a PE-backed facilities services business, always keeps working capital top of mind. Missing collections wasn’t an option for them, so they turned to Daylit to automate their collections process and saw immediate results without needing to add headcount.
Within weeks, Maintera had a fully structured collections automation program running across both companies for the first time in their history. Automated reminders. Organized follow-up cadences. A dedicated collections workflow that no longer lived in Aaron's personal inbox.
The numbers were hard to believe, neither company had ever measured any of this before.
The collections wins were only the beginning. Aaron started using platform data to reprice new contracts, factoring in payment term risk and expected collection timelines. The insight Maintera had been missing became a direct input to how they win new business.
A tool that started as an operational fix became a competitive advantage.
See how teams across industries get paid faster with Daylit's AI agents for accounts receivable.
See how Daylit's AI agents for accounts receivable help teams collect faster, forecast cash with confidence, and unlock working capital.
