"Brilliant Platform"

Brilliant Platform, but terrible customer experience. On 3 or 4 occasions they promised to have something done/delivered by a specific time & date and didn't meet it once. I didn't receive a call or update throughout the process, and actions were only followed up once I called back and chased them. Again, the software is great, it's just a shame the service was really poor, so much so that I've found alternative options to using Sonovate.

"Solid service"

Solid service, no issues, good team!

"Sonovate are always there to help."

Sonovate are always there to help.

They get back to you within minutes for any recruitment advise & Factoring needs, with simple step by step guidance.

I highly recommend speaking with Katie Babich!

"Operational issues, bad credit control, bad reporting"

Sonovate were initially a very friendly company with relatively simple processes. It was easy to set up and easy to obtain funding.

However there are some major issues I’ve identified.

As their fees are all upfront and you do not charge interest on overdue debt it’s within Sonovate’s best interest to collect debt from customers as soon as possible.

During the process of transferring across to another finance provider it has come to light that:

1. Sonovate credit control has let around £26k of 90+ days unpaid invoices build with our clients as they have:
A. Not sent invoices across to clients
B. Not sent small credit notes that would allow the client to pay. For example a £9 credit note on a £1,000 invoice. Our clients have been chasing Sonovate for these credit notes in order to pay the invoice and none were forthcoming.

2. Also Sonovate finance do not seem to have a good reporting system for how much debt is outstanding per recruitment company. We receive manual spreadsheets of what is outstanding for our clients and the last few reports we received completely missed out a client of ours.

An example of how bad the reporting system is: Sonovate received around £4,000 of funds from our clients relating to invoices that Sonovate did not provide funding for. Yet they did not make us aware of this nor did they try to send the funds back to us. This figure didn’t come to light until we were attempting to change service providers.

3. The system to load candidates and rates onto the system not working properly. It doesn’t take into account different rates per day within a week for candidates.

4. Issuing an invoice per candidate per job seems very laborious and could be good to batch invoices together for faster processing.

These seem like serious operational issues within Sonovate credit control and invoicing which if unaddresssed will seriously impact Sonovate’s business model.

"A very good service delivered…"

A very good service delivered especially within the finance department working as a team with transparency.
To date, been a pleasure to work with,

"Sonovate for startups"

I am an independent consultant 18 months into launching my own technology recruitment business. One of my biggest fears going out on my own was funding my contractors, ensuring I had a credible system/portal to pay them and the ability to chase debts should the worst happen.
Sonovate answered all those fears and more - it's basically like having my own finance department - credit checks, contract issuing, timesheet generation/authorisation, invoice issuing, debt control. There is no way I could do all of this without it affecting my productivity. It's great to have that cash flow coming in every week and the ability to pay my contractors without an issue. I have and will continue to recommend Sonovate it is an amazing product that allows startups to thrive and grow.

"Great experience, would recommend"

Everyone I dealt with was very helpful. They talked me through the process very clearly for my first placement and responded to my queries promptly.

"I think that a lot of effort has been…"

I think that a lot of effort has been made, but a simple process feels complicated. The kind of things that I think would help are a explainer video of 60 seconds that we could send to clients. And the same kind of things for candidates. Or a one page info graphic?

Luke has been great, Katie is awesome, but just clunky in terms of how we manage activation of clients and candidates, that’s where we could have done with a lot more help.

"All started well but it started going wrong quickly."

All started well and I was impressed with how simple the process was, albeit it took far too long to credit check the client.
However this is where the exemplary service ended; Having provided my & the contractor's VAT number, he also provided it and had also previously had contracts via Sonovate, I assumed that all would be fine however this was not put into the system and therefore Sonovate decided to start invoicing without a VAT number. When the error was spotted instead of contacting me they decided to start paying me the contractors VAT. I spotted this around a month or so later and tried to contact Sonovate but despite calling & emailing every day it took over a week to get any response.
I then asked for a breakdown of what payments had been made and to whom to reconcile what figure I had been paid that I shouldn't have but kept getting the "all the information is on the portal response" and it was only when I started CCing their CEO that anything really happened.
Given I was paying then c4% of the vatable figure you can understand why I chose not to extend the contractor nor put any more business their way. I am now paying 0.55% for factoring with Metro Bank.

"Pretty poor"

Pretty poor really. Timesheets show on the portal as 'paid' approximately 10 days before they really are. Contacting someone at Sonovate? Not a chance!