The problem
$200K in fees
BACA Systems’ payment stack consisted of PDF invoices, checks, wires, and an expensive, manual card-processing system. Like many businesses, they used a credit card processor through a reseller, and the fee structure was opaque. Andrew Russo, VP of Business Systems at BACA, calculates that the company was losing roughly $200,000 a year in fees.
The exact fee structure was hard to calculate, but we paid over $200,000 in credit card fees in a year.
Andrew Russo, VP of Business Systems
The AR experience wasn’t just slow—it was bad for business. Customers called the front desk to read card numbers over the phone, checks arrived in volume and had to be deposited by hand, wires hit the bank account but not the ERP, and AP and AR each required a dedicated team member’s attention.
Andrew had one hard requirement for a payment system: Whatever replaced the old stack had to live inside of Salesforce. BACA’s team runs their ERP Rootstock on top of Salesforce for every invoice, aging report, and customer record. Using a bolt-on portal was a non-starter—duplicate entry and reconciliation lag would create more problems than they solved. That meant he needed a payment platform that plugged into Rootstock and Salesforce that his salespeople could use easily without having to learn a new system.
The solution
Paid inside Salesforce
BACA introduced Nickel to all of its customers on January 15, 2026. Within a week and a half, every customer had been migrated onto the new system.
With the option of free ACH now easily on offer to customers, Andrew rebuilt BACA’s AR policy from the ground up: Net30 customers get a pay-by-link on every invoice. Net5 customers keep a card on file and get auto-charged if unpaid. Prepay customers pay via link before parts ship. By offering the option of 100% free ACH (eChecks) via an easy-to-use payment link, BACA has been able to completely avoid paying credit card fees by passing them through to customers who still choose to pay by card. Now, customers can choose how they want to pay, and BACA gets paid quickly and keeps the entire invoice amount either way. “We will still accept checks in some cases but they now carry a deposit fee, and our payment-request email says directly that we only accept electronic payments.”
In their first 75 days on the platform, BACA processed $2.3M through Nickel. Because of how much Nickel simplified their payment process, BACA Systems was able to save its operations team more than 23 hours a week.
BACA’s sales team runs on Salesforce, and Rootstock is the ERP layer on top. Every customer record, invoice, and aging report lives there. Before Nickel, payments were the one thing that didn’t. Month-end reconciliation used to mean pulling reports from one system and cross-referencing them in another. With Nickel, there’s nothing to reconcile, and the books match because the payment never left the system of record.
Before Nickel, getting paid meant sending an invoice with BACA’s account and routing number and waiting for a wire confirmation, or picking up the phone to take a card number or waiting on a check. Now BACA sends an invoice and a link, and customers pay by free ACH or card. Either way, BACA keeps the full invoice amount.
I don’t run into a lot of issues, but if I ever do, their team is on it fast.
Andrew Russo, VP of Business Systems
