Better AP Options Sep10

Better AP Options

Senior living providers have a lot to manage in their communities, including engaging residents, dispensing medical care, interacting with families and meeting compliance obligations. Also, like other businesses, they process a constant stream of invoices for material and service purchases. Executing all the various accounts payable tasks manually is time-consuming. Could this burdensome aspect of senior living management be easier, faster and less prone to error? Yes, says Carmin Tomassi, vice president/controller for Silverado, and in a free Sept. 17 webinar he’ll share tips for better AP execution from the Irvine, Calif.-based provider of memory care assisted living and hospice services. Hosted by Senior Living Foresight and moderated by its publisher, Steve Moran, the 35-minute session will also feature Kim Hensley, manager of procure to pay for Yardi. As a Changemakers participant and Yardi client success story subject, Silverado has already offered insight into the cost, time, accuracy and scalability advantages of automated AP. At one point, for example, Tomassi’s staff wrestled with stacks of invoices in various stages of action, endured lengthy approval and reconciliation processes, and juggled no fewer than 12 different systems. Yardi PayScan scans Silverado’s invoices into electronic transactions and automates approval workflows through vendor payment in a single connected system. The solution helped Silverado cut costs with paperless processing, and it enforces consistent standards, minimizes errors and ensures timely vendor payments. Today, Tomassi says, Silverado has “a level of information that we didn’t have before. Now we can act on that data and do something about it. [PayScan] helped our accounting department improve their processes, like really getting people to pay attention to how they’re coding invoices.” Ready to banish your biggest accounts payable headaches, just like Silverado and many others did? Register for the Sept. 17 webinar. It...

Senior Living AP Aug13

Senior Living AP

Growth may be a good problem to have, but you still need a way scale efficiently and effectively. Especially when it comes to accounts payable. As the number of communities in your portfolio grows, so too does the number of vendors to manage and invoices to process. Based out of the Pacific Northwest, Cascadia Senior Living and Development creates and operates innovative independent, assisted living and memory care communities. They started in 2014 with one community, and their commitment to providing excellent care has since helped them expand to 13 communities across Washington and Oregon. For Cascadia’s AP team, things eventually hit a point where their original workflows weren’t sufficing. “Basically, some of the processes that we had in place when we had one community didn’t scale for when we had 13,” said Michael Shefter, CFO of Cascadia. “We had an employee here, our accounts payable manager, who would stuff envelopes for all the checks that we had to cut for our communities.” Cascadia receives roughly 1500 invoices a month, so the time it took to process them all was significant. Already a Yardi client, Cascadia turned to Yardi Bill Pay for the solution. Keeping check cutting in check Part of the Yardi Senior Living Suite, Bill Pay outsources the process of paying vendors to Yardi. The Bill Pay team takes a client’s invoices, routes them through the approval workflow and pays the vendor by ACH, credit card or check. In Cascadia’s case, they decided to have Yardi physically print and mail the checks. The process for getting started with Bill Pay was painless, since it integrates with Yardi Voyager Senior Housing and any already established workflows. Cascadia began with one test community in early spring. “We rolled Bill Pay out with a check...

AP Efficiency

Property managers can save time, reduce errors and decrease paper use with Yardi Bill Pay, an automated vendor payment solution. Yardi Bill Pay, part of the Yardi Procure to Pay Suite, automates check writing, electronic payments and credit card processing for accounts payable (AP). Payments are issued and distributed, then recorded in the user’s Yardi Voyager database in real time. Yardi Bill Pay works seamlessly with approval workflows. Just click a button to authorize Yardi to make the payment on your behalf via ACH, check or credit card. The solution pulls daily payments from the user’s database, creates and transmits files to the user’s banking network, then sends acknowledgement files back to Yardi Voyager. Yardi Bill Pay users have always been able to process incoming payments for accounts receivable, and they can now manage that process and AP from one platform. More than a passive routing system, Yardi Bill Pay can be an active revenue earner by turning AP in a revenue center with credit card payments. Clients have the option of obtaining single-use Mastercard®-branded virtual card numbers to make payments to their vendors. Yardi completes the entire paperless transaction through vendor payment. Benefits of the credit card option include: Earning a rebate percentage on every dollar spent through a credit card Frictionless payment—you just process a payment in Yardi Voyager and the vendor sees the money in their bank a few days later Yardi assistance with vendor outreach Card acceptance driven through VENDORCafé , resulting in higher card acceptance rates than are possible through competing solutions “With both buyers and suppliers looking for ways to increase efficiency and improve their bottom line, virtual card programs can unlock shared value that meets the needs of all parties.” Single-use account solutions combine “the benefits of...