How Bliffert Lumber Automated Accounts Receivable and Processed $13 Million with ECI Drypowder

On any given morning, Bliffert has contractors at the counter, trucks loading in back, and phones ringing nonstop. Most of that growth has come through acquisition, and much of the work behind it happens where customers never see it, in a six-person AR team keeping up with thousands of open accounts.

Before Drypowder, Bliffert ran accounts receivable the way most lumberyards always have. Customers called in to pay, and staff keyed credit cards by hand over the phone, absorbing steep processing fees on every transaction.

Invoice requests piled on top of that. Every request for a copy pulled someone off other work to dig it up and email it back. Jessica Mesmer, AR manager at Bliffert, said her team spent hours each week opening mail, copying checks, keying payments, and mailing envelopes back out. "It's opening the mail, making copies, processing, entering the checks, putting the checks into the mail," she said. "It's a whole thing."

The relationship started through Do It Best, the co-op Bliffert belongs to, where Drypowder founder Kevin Ehinger already knew owner Eli Bliffert. When Drypowder set out to build an AR automation platform for building materials dealers, Bliffert was an ideal partner, as it carried the exact problem at real scale.

Bliffert didn't just adopt Drypowder. It helped build it, sitting down with Drypowder's Aaron Nordyke to map out the product roadmap. "Most of them were developed at our request," Mesmer said. "The invoice copies were a must. When we started, we were manually uploading data into Drypowder because Drypowder couldn't ingest it yet. Once ECI came on board and connected into Spruce, those limitations went away."

Customer reaction has been strong from day one. "We got a lot of feedback in the beginning, like this is great, or Bliffert's finally in the 21st century," Mesmer said. The shift also plays out generationally, as younger owners taking over family construction businesses expect digital tools over a checkbook. "We've gotten feedback like, my dad doesn't have to take care of the bills anymore, because I do it online now," she said.

Bliffert plans to lean harder into Drypowder's AR management tools once its wave of new store openings settles, using the Spruce integration's past-due visibility to move off spreadsheets and make Drypowder its default collections workspace.