CollBox

See what CollBox can collect for you.
Verify account details.
Complete a few simple questions.
Instantly receive a collection offer.
Relax knowing the problem is in good hands.

Inspiration

CollBox was born when one of our team members was running an IT consultancy and learned first hand what it's like to have slow-pay and no-pay customers. He explored debt collection services and found an industry that was inefficient and lacking in trust and transparency. He knew there had to be a better way.

Over $800B goes unpaid to US businesses every year—equivalent to 5% of the US GDP!—seriously straining the cash flow of small businesses.

What it does

CollBox integrates with Xero's invoicing capabilities to allow small business owners to send overdue accounts to collections in just three clicks.

Our webapp identifies overdue accounts, instantly presents the best collection offer available from a network of effective, ethical debt collectors, and—once approved—directly transmits the account details and invoices to the collector so they can get to work immediately. Overdue invoices lose about 15% of their value every 30 days, so timing is of the essence!

CollBox sends notifications of changes in status as the collections process proceeds so the business owner is always up-to-date.

How we built it

The initial prototype of CollBox was built at a hackathon, so we're excited to be adding Xero integration during another hackathon!

CollBox is built in Clojure / ClojureScript, backed by Datomic. It runs entirely within Amazon AWS, leveraging Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, S3, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and SQS.

Challenges we ran into

We didn't run into any serious challenges with this project. Once we had auth / request signing down, the rest was smooth sailing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to be helping small businesses get paid for the hard work they've already put in.

We've already helped hundreds of businesses send thousands of past-due invoices to collections, and we're looking forward to increasing those numbers many fold by becoming a member of the Xero ecosystem.

What's next for CollBox

The next step for CollBox is getting listed in the Xero App Marketplace. Our integration is production-ready and will be rolled out ASAP. We're excited to get it into the hands of Xero users!