Operating from a single source of truth

Fringe, a lifestyle benefits platform, is shaking up the employee benefits industry by asking, “What benefits meet needs now?” Instead of focusing purely on long-term or more traditional programs, Fringe makes it easy for employers to give employees access to subscriptions, services, and experiences that create an immediate impact.

Think popular services like Netflix, Uber, Blue Apron, and wellness and family-oriented incentives that emphasize the here and now. With team connection and office culture looking different these WFH days, fostering moments of genuine camaraderie is a real challenge. Fringe helps build and promote that connection by giving employees the power to pick the benefits they want.

Fringe memberships are all subscription-based. In its early days, the team at Fringe used QuickBooks to manage invoices and track rewards given by employers to employees. Since there was no direct system to manage these subscriptions, all data was entered manually. The team spent multiple hours reconciling the point system, managing subscription updates, fees, vendor accounts, and all new customer onboarding. As Fringe continued to grow and scale, the team needed help to keep up with the increasing demand required to manage the memberships.

To successfully manage their growth, Fringe needed a solution that could automate the subscription management process and centralize their financial data in one location.

One of the primary considerations during the vendor selection process was finding a solution to integrate with Stripe. Having used Stripe’s services in the past, Fringe wanted to leverage Stripe Billing for its subscription management. Beyond integrating with Stripe, the second major consideration was finding a Salesforce-native solution. Since the Fringe team centralized its customer engagement operations on its Salesforce environment, they wanted a solution that would allow them to standardize their data. Blackthorn Payments met both requirements.

Built inside Salesforce, Blackthorn Payments gave the Fringe team the ability to create customizable subscription workflows to process credit, debit, and ACH payments directly from their org while connecting PCI-compliant Stripe transaction data to customer records.

For Andrew Dunlap, Co-Founder of Fringe, Blackthorn was the solution they were looking for. “Blackthorn now sits at the center of all of our billing. It removes the lift of having to manually create and send invoices and helps us tie paid invoices to all of our Salesforce data for a clean audit trail. We’ve automated the entire invoicing process through Blackthorn with Salesforce, and have seen a huge ROI since implementing Payments.”

Now fully implemented with Blackthorn Payments, Fringe can operate from a single source of truth via their Salesforce environment. The centralized system gives Fringe the ability to continue to scale its customer operations with transparent reporting, fully automated subscription management processes, and standardized payment data. Today, Fringe is helping employers delight employees in 35 different countries and has been featured in top publications like Forbes, Fast Company, and Inc.

“No matter what happens, no matter what challenge you have along the way, Blackthorn’s team is going to partner with you on a deep level to ensure the product delivered is exactly what you need it to be,” Dunlap said.