Testimonial

INTRODUCING YARD 1

YARD 1 is one of the fast-growing concrete pumping companies in the Midwest. In just three and a half years, the company has acquired seven concrete pumping businesses across the Chicago, Northwest Indiana, and Milwaukee markets, bringing hundreds of years of combined pumping experience under one operation.

Rapid growth means the need for tight operations and processes, and no one knows that better Ric Popp, Director of Operations at YARD 1 who has been a RapidWorks user for over 10 years.

In this story, we hear from Ric about how switching their payment collection to Rapid Payments transformed their operation from a manual, multi-person workflow to a streamlined, easy to manage process. Rapid Payments is a fully integrated way to collect, track, and manage payments directly within the RapidWorks system.

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Ric Popp

Ric Popp

Director of Operations

How Rapid Payments changed headcount, cost, and speed for YARD 1's payment process.

YARD 1 saw measurable results with Rapid Payments.

✔️ 3 → 1 — Fewer people per transaction. Card verification used to involve up to three people. Now, one dispatcher handles roughly 90% of cases alone.

✔️ 1 FTE AVOIDED — No additional hiring needed. YARD 1 was weighing a new hire just for double data entry between payments and the ERP. Automated exports closed that gap.

✔️ 3.5% → 3% — Lower processing fees. Card processing fees for customers dropped roughly half a percentage point after switching to the Merchant Central portal.

✔️ ~1 HOUR — time to go live. About an hour of training was enough to get the team up and running — one of the smoother rollouts at YARD 1.

Too Many People, Too Much Back-and-Forth

Before Rapid Payments, YARD 1 processed credit cards through Stripe, layered on top of secure messaging and, in Ric's words, "walking back and forth in the office with a notepad to Accounting."

That was manageable when a card went through cleanly. It wasn't when a card got flagged.

"You start talking about credit cards that don't go through on the first try. Banks that mark stuff as fraud, and then we have to wait for the customer to call their bank," Ric says. "We'd go entire days sometimes before getting a valid credit card that goes through."

Getting a card verified pulled in dispatch, the credit manager, and often the billing person, whoever happened to be free. "It just became a big, unnecessary game of telephone" Ric says.

One Dispatcher, One Decision

For YARD 1, the biggest shift wasn't in accounting, it was on the dispatch floor. Whether a truck goes out the next day depends on knowing, quickly, whether a customer's payment will go through.

Using Rapid Payments' Merchant Central portal, that answer now comes back in minutes instead of days.

"The dispatch team gets instant feedback on whether or not the card has gone through, which ultimately helps us create our schedule for the next day... It lets us know if the next customer that calls in, if we're able to take their job or not,” says Ric.

Card verification was once routed through up to three people. Now one dispatcher handles roughly 90% of cases on their own, checking RapidWorks to see whether an account has a hold and making the call to send the truck without needing additional support.

Ending the Double-Entry Grind

Payment speed was one problem. Entering payment data into the books by hand was another.

"Part of our reason for looking to switch accounting software was to give our team the tools they needed to do the heavier work that QuickBooks couldn't give us," Ric explains. Before the switch, YARD 1's team was seriously discussing whether they'd need to hire someone dedicated to re-entering invoices and payments between RapidWorks and their next accounting system.

With the help of the RapidWorks team, YARD 1 was able to create an automated daily export containing weekly invoices, customers, job sites, and daily payment data formatted to match the team’s needs.

"It saved us from having to hire another person for that job," Ric says. "It's a headcount that we would have had to justify. And the fact that we completely knocked that out saved us a lot."

Making Payments More Secure with Rapid Payments

Handling customer card data by notepad and secure messaging isn’t just slow — it carries risk. By using Rapid Payments, Ric and the YARD 1 team have confidently moved that data into one securing system and have also added ACH as a second payment option alongside cards.

"It's a secure method," Ric says. "We aren’t worrying, is the mail going to make it? Will something get lost? Is someone going to intercept it?"

On top of the security improvement, YARD 1's processing fees also came down, from around 3.5% to 3%, a change Ric notes benefits YARD 1's customers as well as the business itself.

A Change That Stuck

Switching core payment workflows can be one of the harder changes to roll out internally for some teams. Ric says theirs wasn’t: "I think this change was probably one of the easier change management processes that we've had at the company... once we were able to go through a quick training session, which I think was about an hour, that's when we really started to see the benefit."

Part of that, he says, comes down to support. Rather than routing every issue through a generic inbox, YARD 1 has a direct line to a customer success manager at RapidWorks.

"I know we can always go to our customer success manager, call them up, and they know the right people to bring in. We're never left hanging."

Fewer people chasing down every card, less double entry, and faster answers for dispatch, that's what switching to Rapid Payments looked like for YARD 1's team.

Want to see what Rapid Payments could do for your billing and dispatch workflow? Schedule a demo to talk with someone who knows your industry.