How CBG Draft Services reduced debt with Payra

Meet CBG Draft Services

CBG Draft Services cleans draft beer lines and installs draft systems across North Carolina. Founded in 2013, the company has grown into the largest provider of its kind in the state.

CBG operates in a unique niche, so over the years the team has built much of its own workflow to fit the way it actually does business. That flexibility mattered when a change in state law reshaped how the company gets paid.

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The problem

In 2024, North Carolina changed the rules on how draft line cleaning gets paid for, and it changed CBG's business overnight. For years, CBG billed its work to roughly 35 alcohol distributors across the state. The new legislation ended that arrangement and required the end customers to pay directly. The company's billing profile went from 35 accounts to 3,500.

• A new volume that needed a new layer. CBG uses Quickbooks for record keeping and invoicing and doesn’t plan to change vendors. What changed was the scale of collections. Work that used to go out as a single invoice for 100 cleaned lines now had to become 100 separate invoices to 100 separate customers every month, each with a payment method on file. CBG needed a dedicated payments and collections layer working alongside its accounting system to handle that volume.
• The real problem was collection, not timing. CBG's terms had always been net 30, so speed was never the issue. The issue was getting paid at all, and the losses were enormous.
• A full-time job spent chasing money. Collections had grown into an entire role. CBG employed a full-time receivables person whose only job, 40 hours a week, was tracking down payments.

The solution

CBG came to Payra through a referral from one of its own distributors, with about a year to prepare for a customer base that was about to grow a hundredfold. Through 2024, the company worked out the right model for billing thousands of new accounts, and rather than forcing CBG into a fixed configuration, Payra adapted as that model took shape.

• Flexible implementation. CBG's setup evolved alongside the business, so Payra's team worked with CBG to build a process that fit its needs.
• Customer payment on file. This is the biggest change Janna credits for the turnaround. With a payment method stored for every customer, CBG is no longer dependent on customers choosing to pay. They have their customers store their payment methods on file before they will do the work for any jobs.
• From manual to automatic. CBG moved to processing payments automatically on the net 30 due date, with customers notified 9 to 10 days in advance. It removed the need for anyone to monitor terms and charge cards by hand. With auto-processing in place, the team no longer works through a list of unpaid invoices; they only touch the exceptions, mostly expired cards or declined payments.
• Real-time payments that get crews out faster. Payments post the moment a customer pays and sync straight back into QuickBooks, so the books stay current and CBG can dispatch work without waiting on a bank deposit to clear.
• Full visibility into every invoice. Payra shows the complete activity trail on every invoice and payment request, including when it was opened, so the team always knows where things stand.
• A team that answers. Janna has a Payra Support Team that responds quickly and follows through, even on the one-off issues that come with managing thousands of accounts.

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Results

Since implementing Payra, CBG Draft Services has seen measurable improvements across its collections process:

• Customers Billed Directly - 35 Distributors to 3,500 Customers
• Annual Bad Debt Written Off - Reduced by roughly 95% year over year
• Collections Labor - 1 full-time AR role at 40 hours per week to a role reabsorbed, with the team only handling a few payments that fail
• Collection Follow-Up Time - Full-day manual calls to digital reminders only
• Cash Applications - Waiting for a bank deposit to real-time syncing, enabling faster dispatch

The numbers tell the story, but the shift underneath them is bigger. A change in state law multiplied CBG's customer count by over 100% and threatened to bury the company in uncollectible invoices. Instead, the work that once consumed a full-time role now runs largely on its own, the team intervenes only on the handful of payments that fail, and an annual loss that once threatened the business has shrunk to a rounding error.

CBG and Payra continue to refine the model together, including setting up the customers who prefer to pay on day one. A regulatory change that could have broken the business has become a process the office can finally see, control, and trust.

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"I wrote off a significant amount of bad debt last year prior to Payra, and about the same the year before that. Without Payra, we would be constantly chasing payment."

CBG Draft Services
CBG Draft Services

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