Cabinet Health brings sustainability to healthcare by reducing plastic waste and developing the first backyard-compostable refillable product system for over-the-counter (OTC) and prescription medications and supplements. As the company’s customer base grew, Co-Founder & CEO Achal Patel began looking for ways to reduce their cash conversion cycle and automate accounts payable processes to build a solid financial infrastructure.
10Hours saved a month1,200Additional stores4-6Month of extended cash runway
The Challenge
When Cabinet Health started adding enterprise partners, its cash conversion cycle increased by 60-90 days. The team needed a solution to bridge the cash flow gap and automate manual vendor payments, which was taking up more than 13 hours a month. They looked at AP and AR platforms such as BILL and similar platforms but found them to be unintuitive with steep learning curves.
The Solution
Settle not only extended vendor payment terms to reduce cash conversion cycles, but also worked with the team during tight cash periods, typically responding within 24 hours.
Settle’s AP Automation also helped cut their time spent on AP by 80%. The team found the platform to be user-friendly and allowed them to seamlessly pay vendors without leaving their existing workflows. Settle also made it easy to collaborate on AP workflows: different departments forwarded invoices to their centralized Settle Inbox so the finance team could manage bills from one place and easily send automated vendor payment notifications and look up payment statuses for ad hoc vendor requests.
The Outcome
Thanks to Settle, the team has saved 10 hours per month on AP processes and extended their cash runway by 4-6 months, delaying the need to seek equity (a typically lengthy and strenuous process). With the time savings and financial flexibility, the team is now focused on channel expansion, entering two new retailers (1,200 additional stores) and adding an enterprise customer by year-end.
Honestly the easiest platform I’ve used for paying bills in terms of ease of use and intuitiveness
Advice to other founders
Achal’s prescription for success is to be open-minded and “to learn to be okay if your plan doesn’t go perfectly as expected, as it rarely does”. Speaking from Cabinet Health’s experience, “It’s about continuing to be a learning machine and be confident in the mission, but also comfortable with approaching it in different ways.”
