Our Founding and Journey
The history of Smyyth and Carixa is interwoven with Creditek, the company (and industry) founded in 1982 by John Metzger, Smyyth's Chairman, and later sold to a global company in 2002. Creditek was the undisputed leader in Accounts Receivable, Deduction Management, and Trade Promotions solutions for Fortune 1000 CPG-Food, Consumer Goods, Consumer Electronics, and Pharmaceuticals brands. We are proud of a stable, tenured management team that embodies that entrepreneurial and foundational spirit, with unmatchable subject matter expertise.
Smyyth (est. 1906), a Creditek subsidiary, was a staffing consultant for credit and accounts receivable. Smyyth was excluded from the 2002 sale of the parent and remade to provide expert software-enabled solutions with a development focus on transformative order-to-cash software (Carixa Suite 2017). In 2018, we divested Credit2B, our platform for business credit decisions, to a strategic acquirer. That move enabled a sharper focus on Carixa, which includes all order-to-cash functions, including accounts receivable, credit, collections, deductions, and trade promotion management.
Creating Value for Our Customers
We have learned from decades of experience in accounts receivable, collection, and deduction management that our clients achieve shareholder value using state-of-the-art software combined with expert services. While accounts receivable is frequently viewed as a clerical transaction process, our experience is that with robust technology, experience, and good strategy, it can be a notable contributor to profits and working capital. We are obsessive and passionate about creating value for our customers through Carixa software and expert services by optimizing accounts receivable processes to deliver maximum financial benefit. We love this business.
What We Discovered About Accounts Receivable
Our management team has an extraordinary knowledge of the accounts receivable process spanning decades of managing, often from the "inside," tens of billions of dollars of the most complicated trading partner "exception" receivables. This includes outsourcing, auditing, reconciling, and recapturing trade promotion bill-backs, pricing, discounts, product returns, compliance, and shipping errors for some of the largest companies in the world. As a result, we added client value by shrinking the leakage in profit and revenue using our advanced automation with expert services.
Shifting our Strategy to Software Automation
After seeing the results of Carixa-enabled deduction services, we decided to use our team's deep know-how from hundreds of client engagements in credit, accounts receivable, collections, and deduction management, and apply it to the next advance, Carixa Cloud Suite, informed by our team's profound industry experience. Carixa was set up separately in 2018, and servicing clients with ever-changing requirements, we are constantly enhancing our technology to keep ahead of their needs. Adding robust trade promotion automation for bill-back matching, approval, and accrual functionality to Carixa significantly benefited consumer product companies. For all industries, automated cash application processing has eliminated delays in closing day's cash and kicked off the deduction resolution workflow in Carixa. Using robotic process automation, AI, and machine learning, Carixa has eliminated most of the routine and work inherent in AR processing. Powerful and flexible workflows enable end-to-end credit, collection, and payment exception resolution.
Our Philosophy, Funding, and Long-Term Journey
We are a focused and determined management group with a long-term perspective, and the business has been self-funding and profitable from the first year, nearly twenty years ago. This means we can invest in our technology and services to do the right thing for our clients without external pressures for short-term results. Carixa Suite software will continue progressing based on client needs, deep subject matter expertise, and "computer learning" from processing millions of transactions.
It almost seems quaint today, but we've built our businesses with no Series A, Series B, Venture Capital, SPACS, etc., and we have zero debt. This allows us to take a long view and focus on our clients' success.