You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: On the call today we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow.
Some of you may know her from her IR role with tech-driven companies like Groupon, and Lawson Software, and from Buffalo Wild Wings.
Keith, Jane, and I look forward to working with her.
We're pleased to have delivered improved third quarter results despite continued pandemic-related economic pressures, including nearly 300 basis point improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin.
We continue to make meaningful progress on executing our overall transformation to One Deluxe.
As discussed last quarter, we began to see an improvement in the latter part of our second quarter, which continued into the third quarter.
We see our sequential improvement in topline revenue, GAAP and adjusted EBITDA margins as clear evidence of our continued momentum.
By our estimates, we delivered sales driven growth, excluding COVID-related impacts, for the third consecutive quarter.
We continue to win new business at an accelerated rate, and we're successfully cross-selling our products and services.
We're pleased to have the financial strength and flexibility to support the long-term growth potential of the business.
We've restored some of our investments in the company's overall infrastructure, including technology upgrades, continued real estate consolidations, streamlined organization design, talent enhancements and more, after slowing a bit in Q2.
Importantly, we remain confident in our financial strength, as demonstrated by declaring our regular quarterly dividend.
Our net debt is now at its lowest in more than two years.
I continue to believe this is all compelling evidence our One Deluxe strategy is working.
Here are some specifics.
We delivered 23.3% adjusted EBITDA margins.
A 290 basis point sequential improvement from last quarter, better improvement than we expected.
We reported revenue of $439 million, improving over 600 basis points sequentially over second quarter with revenue down 11% or $54 million versus last year -- also better improvement than we expected.
Our sales-driven performance continues.
We've built cash reserves from operations.
Our Q3 net debt is now at the lowest level in more than two years.
We fully repaid our COVID-related draw on the revolver in October, demonstrating the strength of our business.
Over the last seven months of the pandemic, we continued to generate cash from operations, naturally improving our liquidity and eliminating the need for any additional cushion.
Our financial position continues to serve as a competitive advantage, helping us win across all our segments.
Adjusting for decisions we made to slow progress of the pandemic, we're on path and on budget in our technology infrastructure upgrade and renewal.
We closed nearly 50 of more than 80 sites, representing nearly a 60% reduction in the number of our locations over the last 18 months, including seven additional site closures in Q3.
We're particularly pleased with the future operating savings and significant capital avoidance we're going to achieve by relocating both our Minneapolis headquarters and Atlanta technology facilities to more efficient spaces.
Now, on to sales.
We continue to make progress in becoming a sales-driven revenue growth company.
Everyone sells at Deluxe.
Our One Deluxe approach works, bringing the best of Deluxe to our customers to solve their problems rather than simply pedaling one solution at a time.
We continue to outperform our pre-pandemic sales plan, and of course over a thousand deals with multi-year contracts year-to-date, including six of our top-25 targets.
We signed significant wins in each of our four businesses during the third quarter.
It will take time to onboard these wins and the pandemic environment lengthens implementation timelines as our clients work through sequencing their own priorities.
However, we're very proud to be expanding our pipeline and closing new business at record rates, giving us confidence that we'll exit 2020 with a strong backlog for us to focus our efforts on converting to revenue.
Some of our key wins for the quarter include securing a contract with M&T Bank for our treasury management services.
We expanded our relationship with RE/MAX to provide national marketing, branded print and promotional solutions to their 65,000 agents.
This is an excellent example of us growing share and moving from a transactional vendor to a recurring revenue managed services partner.
And our MPX and DPX solutions added Delta Dental and Albertsons as customers too.
Our telesales centers continued to cross-sell, delivering record average order value.
Combined with our enterprise efforts, we've signed more than a 175 cross-sell deals totaling $11 million in total contract value.
The results are clear even amid the COVID fog.
We're winning new business across all our decisions, delivering record cross-sell performance selling our existing solutions to existing customers while adding new customers and distribution partners.
This continued success gives us confidence that we'll be able to deliver sales-driven revenue growth in the low- to- mid-single digits with adjusted EBITDA margins of 20% or more over the long-term.
Now, onto some segment details.
Our Payments business continues to perform well and delivered 15.6% revenue growth over prior year.
We are well positioned in our receivables, payables and SMB cash management businesses, where we're winning new clients and market share and benefiting from positive secular outsourcing trends as firms focus on speed and efficiency in accounts receivables.
We continue to see new and long-standing customers shifting volume to the safety of Deluxe due to our strong balance sheet and trusted service levels.
Our cloud and promotional solutions divisions continued to experience the greatest COVID-related impacts, and accordingly we expect revenue and profit growth to lag the recovery due to reduced discretionary spending.
In cloud, this impact is visible in data-driven marketing revenue, where mainly financial institutions have deferred campaign spend.
We believe the financial institution spend will return and, in fact, we saw increased demand in Q3 versus last year's quarter.
We've also signed new financial institution customers as well.
While our incorporation and website services have experienced weakened demand, we continue to focus on adding new relationships to deliver our incorporation and website services, including The Hartford and NFIB.
Our Promotional Solutions delivered sequential quarterly improvement in revenue while driving significant benefit to adjusted EBITDA margins.
While we did not repeat the benefit we saw from PPE in Q3, we did experience positive sequential growth in what we call our business essentials product area, forms and more that business use to operate.
We also signed several new customers focused on our managed brand services program, giving us more confidence in our future profitable growth.
As anticipated, the secular decline in the Checks business sequentially improved during the third quarter, consistent with the pattern of previous economic downturns.
We continue to see an increase in new Check customers resulting from new business start-up.
We're encouraged to see self-service and digital order volume acceleration in the third quarter, proving our digital strategy works.
Competitively, we're winning new Check customers at a rate faster than before and we renewed a top-five Check customer.
Our financial strength is a key factor here too, just like in Payments.
The uncertainty of the pandemic continues.
And as such, we will not provide detailed outlook for the fourth quarter or full-year 2021 today.
Keith will provide some detail on our future expectations, which reflect today's environment.
The macro environment remains challenged as we're in the midst of a second wave of COVID.
Most importantly, given the work we've accomplished, the results we've delivered despite the ongoing challenges, I feel good about our relative position in the market and we continue to believe total company adjusted EBITDA margins will remain at our long-term target of 20% or better.
Lastly, I want to emphasize our team has delivered better than expected performance again, despite the pandemic.
Deluxe remains financially sound.
We expanded margins almost 300 basis points, paid our dividend, paid our revolver down to the pre-COVID level, have the lowest net debt in more than two years, and our sales engine is working.
As Barry noted, our strategy is working, and we are seeing the results.
We delivered strong sequential performance in the third quarter despite the continued challenging environment.
We've strengthened our financial position, while simultaneously advancing our business transformation.
Q3 total revenue declined 11% or $54.1 million to $439.5 million as compared to the same period last year.
This is a sequential improvement of 600 basis points from the Q2 decline rate.
While we did benefit from sales-driven growth, it wasn't sufficient to overcome the impacts of the pandemic.
Importantly and similarly to last quarter, we took assertive actions in the quarter to address the loss of revenue and change in mix.
These expense actions improved adjusted EBITDA margins by 290 basis points sequentially to 23.3%.
Some of this improvement will not repeat in Q4, but we do expect margins to remain in our long-term range of greater than 20%.
The third quarter revenue decline was partially offset by new and cross-sell wins.
The reduction in revenue and the change in mix did affect our results.
Gross profit margin for the quarter improved 160 basis points from the prior year with the loss of lower margin revenue in our promotional and cloud segments.
SG&A expense declined $14.4 million due primarily to lower commissions, personnel exits, 401(k) match suspensions and restructuring actions.
Interest expense declined $3.6 million due to lower interest rates on higher borrowing levels compared to last year.
All this together, increased operating income to $44.4 million, net income of $29.4 million, increased from a net loss of $318.5 million in Q3 2019.
Last year's net income included non-cash asset impairment charges for goodwill and certain intangibles totaling $391 million.
Our adjusted EBITDA for the period was $102.5 million, $16.8 million lower than the same period last year.
The adjusted EBITDA margin declined 90 basis points to 23.3% on a year-over-year basis, but sequentially increased by 290 basis points compared to the second quarter.
Now, on to segment details.
Payments revenue grew compared to last year by 15.6% to $74.7 million, with Treasury Management revenue leading the growth in the quarter.
As expected, we continued to experience softness in our Payroll business because of elevated unemployment levels.
We expect Q4 revenue to grow sequentially and be single digit on a year-over-year basis.
Adjusted EBITDA margin decreased to 22.4%, primarily due to increased costs related to last year's large client win.
We anticipate adjusted EBITDA margin pressure to continue into Q4 due to lapping of one-time hardware sales and outsource deals in Q4 2019, as well as expected COVID-related client implementation delays.
Cloud Solutions revenue declined 20.3% to $63.8 million from last year.
Data-driven marketing solutions revenue sequentially improved from last quarter, as financial institutions slowly reactivated their marketing campaign.
Web and hosted solutions experienced declines related to the loss of customers discussed last year, expected attrition from our decision to stop investing in certain product lines, plus the economic impact of the macro environment.
Adjusted EBITDA margin increased to 25.7% as we benefited from mix shift in cost reductions.
We expect the loss of revenue associated with Q4 2020 product exits will continue to impact the business into 2021, but we anticipate cloud margins to remain healthy in the low-to-mid 20s range.
Promotional Solutions revenue declined 20.3% to $124.9 million from last year.
Compared to prior quarter, revenue grew about 6% and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 260 basis points, as the mix shifted and costs were removed.
In the case of Promotional Solutions, we see the pullback most acutely in marketing and promotional solutions, where revenues are tied to events and branded merchandise.
We believe the business will continue to improve, but we are not expecting a rapid recovery until COVID-19 impacts abate.
Check revenue declined 8.4% from last year to $176.1 million due to the secular decline, combined with the pandemic.
Adjusted EBITDA margin decreased to 48.3% as a result of higher commissions on referrals and technology investments in support of our One Deluxe strategy.
Check recovery rates in Q3 likely benefited from some delayed Q2 volume and we expect revenue recovery to be slightly lower in Q4 compared to Q3, as general economic activity continues to improve.
This performance is consistent with the recovery from previous economic slowdowns.
Year-to-date, cash from operating activities was $166.8 million and capital expenditures were $42.7 million.
Free cash flow, defined as cash provided by operating activities, less capital expenditures, was $124.1 million, a decline of $34.2 million.
The primary drivers of decline were COVID-related revenue decline, cloud business losses described last year and expected secular Check declines.
These were partially offset by lower taxes, integration and legal settlements.
We did not repurchase common stock in Q3 and we expect to repurchase less in 2020 than previous years.
We ended the quarter with strong liquidity of $413 million and our cash balance was $310.4 million.
In October, we paid down another $140 million of the revolving credit facility, repaying 100% of our COVID-related March draw.
This repayment is not reflected in our reported credit facility balance of $1.04 billion or cash balance at the quarter-end.
I think it's important to note that we have consistently built liquidity throughout the year.
In addition, net debt has continued to decrease, and in the quarter at $730 million, the lowest level in more than two years for the second consecutive quarter during a pandemic.
I want to pause here.
The pandemic has challenged us.
But this new management team is delivering.
In Q3, we expanded margins sequentially.
Our year-to-date adjusted EBITDA margin is at 20.2%, within our long-term target range.
As Barry noted, we remain cautious about the pace of the recovery, given the uncertainties ahead and the COVID resurgence.
We expect the revenue decline to worsen on a percentage basis in Q4 versus Q3 due to COVID-related customer implementation and program delays, combined with the impacts of product exits in cloud.
However, we do expect to maintain adjusted EBITDA margins within our long-term target of 20% or better.
Our bold actions and winning strategy maintain the company's financial strength and position us for long-term growth.
Our team and business model are highly durable, giving us the runway to complete our historic transformation.
As further evidence of our strength, our Board approved a regular quarterly dividend of $0.30 per share on all outstanding shares.
The dividend will be payable on December 7, 2020 to all shareholders of record on November 23, 2020.
I am proud of our financial performance in light of the pandemic.
Our financial position is strong, our strategy is working.
We are well positioned to accelerate our transformation and deliver long-term shareholder returns.
Now, back to Barry.
I want to build on your comments and reiterate our remarkable Q3 achievements.
We increased margin sequentially, almost 300 basis points.
Net debt declined to the lowest level in more than two years.
We expanded liquidity with cash from operations, while fully repaying our COVID-related draw on our revolver.
We declared our regular dividend.
Our Payments business grew 16% and we're confident we'll be a double-digit grower over the long term.
Our One Deluxe sales strategy is working.
By our estimates, we've been a sales-driven growth company for three consecutive quarter.
The strength of our balance sheet and fiscal responsibility is helping us win new business and positions us well for the future.
COVID may have temporarily slowed our progress, but we still believe Deluxe will be a low- to- mid-single digit revenue growth company with margins in the low- to- mid-20s over the long term.
We're proud of our progress to the absolute and especially in light of COVID.
Finally, I want to recognize the extraordinary contribution of my follow Deluxers.
The team has risen to the unprecedented challenges of COVID and continued to deliver for our clients.
Our team went to work and got the job done.
We're a team living our purpose, values and ownership culture, because we are all shareholders too.
Now, we'll take questions.

user
deluxe corp qtrly revenue $439.5 million versus $493.6 million.

assistant