At BMS Technologies, rolls of paper that will feed into new multimillion-dollar printing equipment takes up space on the shop floor, and envelope-stuffing machines can be heard clacking away from inside a conference room.

Yet owner Nick Di Spaltro said, “We’re not a printing company. We’re a technology company.”

Indeed, the company, which began as a direct-mail printer called Bend Mailing Services, wouldn’t be where it is today without the technical innovations Di Spaltro introduced in 2003 after graduating from Washington State University and returning to Bend to work at his parents’ firm.

Di Spaltro created a software application that allowed the printer to create billing statements from raw data files, giving it a fortuitous foothold with municipalities, utilities and waste haulers. Then in late 2011, the company began offering online bill paying.

BMS Technologies has 35 employees and occupies 30,000 square feet of space between its headquarters on Paiute Way in southeast Bend and a leased facility on the north side. While printing is still a staple of the business, Di Spaltro is looking to the future with the acquisition of customer relationship management software, Accu-Trax, developed by a Southern Oregon company.

BMS Technologies bought Accu-Trax for an undisclosed sum in January, hired several programmers and is in the midst of an overhaul expected to be complete in September. Di Spaltro thinks Accu-Trax can compete with products that are nationally marketed to waste haulers, which are part of BMS Technologies’ core customer base.

BMS is already providing paper statements and e-statements, and online bill-paying, so Di Spaltro sees no reason the company can’t become part of a fully integrated system that includes Accu-Trax.

“There’s so much technology out there right now, and that’s the best part of this business,” said Di Spaltro, 36. Di Spaltro bought the business from his parents in January of 2015.

The app Di Spaltro created in 2003 allowed Bend Mailing Services’ clients to send raw data, rather than finished files. The printer then converted the data into text and images and created a billing statement. With that technology, the company shifted from a reliance on one-time direct mail jobs to a steady stream of revenue from municipalities, utilities and waste haulers — all of which have to send out monthly billing statements. And while more and more people decline to receive paper statements, BMS has protected its revenue stream by providing PDF versions of bills, as well as newsletters and other material that its clients send customers every month.

With the introduction of online bill-paying services, the company has expanded throughout most of the United States and into Guam, England and Ireland. BMS Technologies now has 320 regular clients, mainly in utilities and waste hauling but hopes to expand into the health care and retail sectors.

The new printing technology will cut down on BMS’ paper costs and give it the flexibility to create different types of billing statements with features such as red ink for past-due payments, Di Spaltro said. He hopes to leverage the company’s customer-service reputation into software sales.

About half of BMS’ printing clients also use its online bill-payment software, but others can’t because their other software vendors won’t allow the systems to talk to each other, said Jeff Evans, BMS client solutions manager.

Accu-Trax was created by Pat Fahey, the owner of Southern Oregon Sanitation in Grants Pass, in the 1990s to handle route management, bill tracking and other business functions, and it’s used by 27 other waste haulers. Fahey, a BMS customer, was looking to focus more on the waste-hauling business and offered to sell the software to BMS, Evans said.

BMS hopes to begin marketing Accu-Trax to 2,500 other water, electric and municipal utility clients over the next five years, Evans said. Many of those potential customers still manage their customer data with spreadsheets and hand-built databases, he said.

There are thousands of customer relationship management, or CRM, software products in existence, but most of them fill a narrow niche, said Ryan Comingdeer, chief technology officer at Five Talent, a Bend software development firm. Expanding beyond a few clients or across industries takes a huge marketing and selling budget because companies are so unwilling to migrate their data into new programs, he said. “If the marketing’s not there, if the sales effort’s not there, it’s not going to grow,” he said.

BMS has already built a data migration tool, Evans said, and he hopes it will reassure potential customers that their businesses will be running smoothly by a certain date. “That’s probably one of the most important elements.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7860, kmclaughlin@bendbulletin.com