DadeSystems: Mobile Deposits Must Serve The Middleman Too

Tom Berdan, chief marketing officer at startup DadeSystems, is working from his home office in Orlando, where the air conditioner is broken. He’s got a repair guy on the way. After the unit is fixed, Berdan will have a few payment options depending on the repair company’s preferred methods.

Cash, of course, always speaks. Checks may not be elegant, but in the absence of a card reader dongle, they’ll get the job done. If the technician works for a high-tech company, Berdan may even have the luxury of choosing to pay with plastic or a contactless method.

Chances are, however, that the service tech doesn’t have any fancy dongles. He probably accepts cash and checks. He probably has a collection of them already in his car. And he probably brings that stack back to the office at the end of the day — or perhaps every couple of days — to do a big batch of deposits all at once. Or, maybe he mails the checks to the central office by overnight delivery.

Berdan said that’s because, even though there are plenty of mobile deposit apps for consumers, there are far fewer focused on commercial mobile deposits. The commercial mobile deposit apps that do exist, he added, are generally designed for business owners, providing excess data, such as balances, transfers and other features that higher-ups need to know but field personnel do not.

Even banks that offer commercial mobile deposit, Berdan added, are only solving half the problem for service providers like the HVAC repairman, field representatives, salespeople and drivers. The check may be deposited in its rightful place, but the mobile tools available to field personnel do not solve for accounts receivable reconciliation, he said.

It was clear to Berdan that someone needed to solve for the middleman — the service provider or field rep standing between the business entity and the individual consumer. That, he said, is why DadeSystems was born: to do the simple yet complex task of accepting payments for field personnel.

Berdan explained that enabling commercial mobile deposits saves time across the organization.

Personnel don’t have to spend time processing payments later in the week; they can close out transactions as soon as jobs are completed. That saves them as much as one to three hours a week, salespeople have told Berdan.

Companies don’t have to allocate resources to data entry as batches of reconciliation documents flood their inboxes at the end of the day. They don’t have to consolidate cash deposited in remote accounts into a primary operating account.

With commercial mobile deposits and automated reconciliation for accounts receivable, said Berdan, all it takes is a camera and an internet connection.