Challenge

Founded in 2001, Procede Software provides its Excede platform to commercial truck, trailer, bus, and equipment dealerships, as well as aftermarket parts operations. Across the US and Canada, these dealerships rely on Excede to manage accounting, parts, service, lease and rental, and vehicle sales, all from one connected system.

Historically, Excede handled payments through a set of limited integrations with third-party tools. But commercial vehicle dealerships have complex payment needs: they must accept payments online and in person, across multiple locations, and from a wide variety of customer types. The existing setup created numerous inefficiencies.

Dealers created invoices and managed customer accounts in Excede, but in many cases had to collect and reconcile payments outside the platform. “That fragmentation created duplicate work, reporting gaps, reconciliation friction, and an inconsistent customer experience,” said Ben Jenkins, senior vice president of fintech at Procede.

Remote payments posed an additional challenge. Staff often had to collect card details over the phone or by text, creating security and compliance risks. Dealerships also struggled to combat fraud without declining legitimate transactions—an acute issue in an industry with high transaction values.

To address these issues and respond to consistent customer feedback, Procede focused on building a more connected financial ecosystem within Excede—one that could improve satisfaction, efficiency, and flexibility across the dealership experience. This led the company to seek a modern financial infrastructure provider capable of integrating payments directly into Excede and supporting a reliable payment workflow, whether customers were paying at the counter or from the side of the road after a breakdown.

Solution

After considering several vendors, Procede chose Stripe in 2024 to power its own product, Payments, a unified payment experience for dealerships.

“Our customers should always have choices. With Payments, they can choose an elegant, fully embedded experience built directly into Excede,” said Larry Kettler, CEO and chairman of Procede Software. “That connection matters not only to the dealership, but to the customers they serve. Since every payment reflects on the dealership, our goal is to make that experience seamless and easy from start to finish.”

The team worked with Stripe professional services for technical and strategic implementation guidance, accelerating development and keeping the technical work aligned with its go-to-market plan. Stripe worked closely with Procede, including multiple onsite engagements, to support a strong technical integration. That hands-on partnership helped Procede gather merchant feedback early, refine the product based on real user needs, and launch a pilot program ahead of full rollout.

“Stripe gave us a strong foundation to embed payment processing into Excede while keeping the dealer workflow centered in our platform,” said Jenkins, adding that Stripe’s breadth of solutions positioned the company well for future growth.

Procede also implemented Stripe Connect to provide a fully white-labeled payments service for dealerships, allowing them to accept online and in-person payments within the Excede platform. The company opted for Stripe-hosted onboarding, which guides dealerships through the collection of required business and identity information and shifts the burden of verification from Procede to Stripe.

With Connect, a dealership’s customer pays for a transaction generated in Excede and Stripe processes the payment through Stripe Payments. Procede implemented payment links for remote payments. Now, dealerships can create a payment page with a few clicks and email or text it to their customers, rather than collecting sensitive credit card information over the phone.

Procede chose Stripe Checkout to provide a prebuilt, hosted payment page within Excede. At checkout, the company enabled payment methods including credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and ACH direct debit.

To improve payment performance, Procede enabled Authorization Boost, which includes network tokens and the card account updater, to reduce declines and maximize authorization rates.

Procede implemented Stripe Terminal to manage in-person payments. Terminal combines hardware and software to unify offline and online payments. For hardware, Procede chose the Stripe Reader S700, a smart reader that dealerships use to both display terms and conditions and accept payments, including contactless in-person payments with Tap to Pay. Procede also embedded Terminal’s software capabilities into the Excede front-desk experience, allowing staff to connect in-person payments to relevant customer and transaction data. The integration also allows dealerships to capture signatures digitally within Excede, both during checkout and outside the payment workflow, such as when a customer approves a repair estimate before payment is due.

To help protect dealerships from fraud, Procede implemented Stripe Radar, which uses AI trained on data from billions of transactions to detect and block fraudulent activity. Procede configured Radar’s rules to prevent known fraud schemes, such as rings of fraudulent actors who target dealerships. The company also used Radar’s analytics to review authorization trends and blocked payments and identify new fraud patterns.

Results

Procede launched embedded payments in 3 months and is growing payment volume by 190% year-over-year

With Stripe, Procede offers dealerships a solution for the industry’s diverse and complex range of payment workflows. By adopting Stripe’s product suite and working closely with Stripe professional services, the company moved from concept to launch in just three months.

Today, customers can complete payments with minimal friction, regardless of whether they’re at the dealership or on the road. Since launching Procede Payments, transaction volume has grown steadily across both new and existing dealerships, and Procede’s payment volume has increased 190% year-over-year.

Payment success rate increased by 1.47 percentage points to 98.8%

Procede has achieved a payment success rate of 98.8%, up 1.47 percentage points since adopting Stripe. “That number represents fewer interrupted legitimate payments, less staff intervention, and a smoother customer experience,” said Jenkins.

Terminal brings in-person payments into Excede

With Terminal integrated into the Excede front-desk experience, Procede can offer dealerships a unified payment experience that connects hardware, payment acceptance, reporting, and reconciliation. Staff can access customer information within the same workflow during in-person transactions. And by digitizing forms and signatures in Excede, Procede reduced the need for printed forms and manual paperwork while allowing dealerships to email completed documents directly to customers.

Together, these capabilities bring payments deeper into dealerships’ daily operations and strengthen Excede’s ability to connect key workflows across the dealership. “It makes the case that Excede is the dealer operating platform, not just a system of record,” said Jenkins.

Radar helps dealerships keep dispute rates below 0.1%

Since launching Radar, Procede’s dispute rate has remained below 0.1%, limiting fraud-related costs for dealerships while allowing legitimate payments to move forward without unnecessary friction.

Reconciliation time drops by up to 97%

Procede built automated reconciliation directly into Excede using transaction data from Stripe. Work that once took hours across multiple dealer locations using fragmented payment systems is now centralized in Excede, delivering a 97% reduction in reconciliation time, according to one multi-location dealer group.

“We’ve essentially eliminated the chaos of pulling paper from machines and sending Excel files up to corporate,” said Jenkins. “That work is now centralized and automated in Excede.”