Akshai Rao’s path to Yardi wound from Austin, Texas, where the vice president of Procure to Pay earned his bachelor’s degree before taking a job in Northern California. He then went to Michigan for business school and Boston for another job before landing back in Austin as a Yardi employee in 2013. Today Rao oversees client services for Yardi Procure to Pay, an end-to-end procurement, vendor management and electronic invoicing platform. He shared highlights of the platform with us in a recent interview. Q: What matters most to property managers who deal with goods and services procurement? A: They want to perform their back office tasks, especially procurement and accounts payable, more efficiently. That lets them spend more time on front office duties, such as building compliance and customer services. Q: Can you describe how the elements of Yardi Procure to Pay meet those priorities? A: We provide one platform for the entire procure to pay process—approval workflows for purchase orders and invoices that are consistent with the client’s process, plus online purchasing, vendor management, outsourced invoice management and vendor payment services. All of these processes are accessible in real time and built into the Yardi Voyager® property management and accounting platform. Yardi has documented client savings of up to 80% on per-invoice costs and 75% on per-invoice processing time. A single connected procurement solution makes day-to-day purchasing, payment and vendor management as simple as possible. In addition, we’re building a robust analytics package to help clients pinpoint areas in which they can make process improvements.  We can compare our clients’ processes to industry benchmarks, and make recommendations to improve their current processes. Yardi Bill Pay, which is part of both Yardi Payment Processing and the Yardi Procure to Pay Suite, outsources check, ACH...

With seventeen communities—and more on the way—each submitting 100-200 invoices a month, Linda Adams was shuffling a lot of paper. As the Accounting Manager for Northbridge Companies, a New England-based senior living provider, much of her time used to be spent digging up receipts or tracking down paper records across various decentralized offices. “When I had questions, I had to call another office and ask them. They’d have to find the invoice, scan it, send it to me for review. It was very time consuming on both ends.” But now, solving a discrepancy is “easy, easy, easy,” thanks to Yardi PAYscan. In 2011, Northbridge adopted Yardi’s Procure to Pay vendor management and electronic invoicing platform to streamline invoicing across all properties. The new system allowed the accounting department to access invoices and check whether payments had cleared without having to pick up the phone to call another office. In other words, team members could self-serve, reducing internal dependencies and churn. But time savings wasn’t the only benefit of a new system. PAYscan eliminates copying, mailing, and storing paper—and minimizes touch points that can lead to lost invoices and data entry errors. “There’s no need for us to use up valuable office space with paper invoices anymore when it’s all right there electronically. Once the tax returns are done, we can throw the documents out,” Linda says. “I can go back and look at invoices from 2012, and it’s right there. Plus, I work from home a few days a week, and it really cuts down on all that lugging paper back and forth.” The Northbridge team appreciates PAYscan’s versatility, too. “You can make the approval process as intricate or as easy as you want, which I love,” said Linda. Customizable workflows, flexible payment options...

Are you feeling energized for 2018? It’s a new year, bringing fresh challenges and opportunities. And while every January can inspire a list of resolutions, for every real estate business one goal is likely to top the list year after year: reduce costs. When it comes to lowering operational expenses, going paperless for as many tasks as possible is smart. And here’s some great news: it’s easier to do than you might think, and the benefits are big. For Dallas-based apartment manager LumaCorp, centralizing and automating procurement and payables processing on its mobile Yardi property management platform using Yardi Procure to Pay has not only reduced costs for the company, but also saves its staff valuable time (in addition to sparing more than a few trees). And in just three months, by eliminating the cost of transporting invoices by courier, Procure to Pay paid for itself. Better Buying and Bigger Discounts LumaCorp manages 24 apartment communities with more than 6,000 units. According to Larry Orth, LumaCorp’s controller, the company’s maintenance, repair and operating supply costs fell by 4 percent the first year after adopting Yardi Procure to Pay, an end-to-end, paperless procurement and invoice processing system that’s part of the Yardi Multifamily Suite full-business platform. Orth said, “For me, the great thing about it is the time efficiency, both at the properties and in the accounting department. We are a full service Procure to Pay client, so the processing is handled by Yardi, which takes a lot off our onsite people’s hands. All told, Procure to Pay has reduced by up to 40 percent the time our team spends on the payables process. And it’s a paperless system, which obviously also benefits the environment.” LumaCorp has also gained savings from the negotiated pricing across...

Cutting costs never loses appeal, even in a robust industry and a thriving economy. Inescapable expenses such as insurance and taxes, along with competitive pressures, have forced property owners to become increasingly creative in finding opportunities to cut costs and work more efficiently. Processing payments for the various products and services that keep properties running smoothly is one of those inevitable expenses. This historically has been a manually intensive and paper-heavy process.  Routing one paper vendor invoice through payment can take as long as 30 days and cost up to $35 dollars, according to data compiled by Yardi. With potentially thousands of invoices coming in every month, those costs add up fast for property owners and managers. A recent analysis examined 25 million invoices that about 1 million vendors submitted for processing by Yardi Procure to Pay on behalf of more than 1,000 real estate businesses.  The study offered insight into ways that companies handling small and large volumes of invoices can streamline the process and reduce costs and staff burdens. The Yardi Procure to Pay study found that businesses submitting five or more invoices per month, which account for just 7% of vendors but 75% of invoices, often require accounts payable or property teams that spend significant amounts of time scanning, keying and verifying these large invoice volumes. Even vendors submitting a low volume of invoices—four or fewer per month—can spend an inordinate amount of time on invoices, often repeatedly calling client properties for status checks or sending duplicate invoices until they are paid. All this activity takes up significant time and effort from accounting departments and property-level staff.   Streamlined Approvals Fortunately, the procure-to-pay process has become dramatically more efficient in terms of labor and expense in recent years. Many real estate...

Arriving at the Rittenhouse Claridge in Center City Philadelphia on a cold winter’s night in January, the first thing you might notice is a charming string of white holiday lights over the lobby door. Stepping out of the cab into sub-freezing temperatures with wind chill, ducking inside the warm and welcoming lobby felt like stepping into the apartment of a dear friend. We were visiting Philadelphia to see first-hand how Yardi client the Kaiserman Company uses Yardi’s Procure to Pay platform to optimize its procurement process, streamlining ordering and delivery and making invoice approvals easier than ever before. Procure to Pay has helped Kaiserman save $60,000 annually, reduce paper use by 50 percent, and redirect staff time to other important tasks. The company uses the Yardi Voyager platform for its multifamily and commercial portfolios, and after implementing two years ago, has found the cloud-hosted solution to be invaluable. “We love it. I have been in the industry for awhile, used many different platforms, and Yardi is by far my favorite. Our leasing teams, our management teams and even our corporate office have access to Yardi. It just makes doing everyday tasks simpler,” said property manager Eric Schulz. The Rittenhouse Claridge One of just two apartment buildings located right on Philadelphia’s iconic Rittenhouse Square, the Rittenhouse Claridge was built in the 1950s by its current owner/operators, the Kaiserman Company. Over the last several years, an effort to restore the property to its midcentury roots has been underway, with charming results. On the building’s second floor, a sprawling common area with comfortable seating, fireplaces, reading nooks, game tables, a kitchen and private meeting spaces overlooks the Square. In one corner is the spacious gym, where a line of treadmills looks directly over the park. The vibe...

Yardi’s Procure to Pay platform was recently featured on “Corporate Review,” hosted by Donald Trump Jr. with airings on the Bloomberg channel and Fox Business Network. The focus of the piece, conducted in an interview format with Brad Setser, Yardi’s Vice President of Marketing, and Akshai Rao, Business Development Manager for Procure to Pay, is the myriad business efficiencies that can be created thanks to the Procure to Pay product. “If you can centralize your purchasing on an online Procure to Pay system, there are several things you will be able to do,” Setser explained. “You will be able to leverage volume pricing much more easily than if all of your (property) sites are doing different things. Number two, you will be able to deliver and enforce policies and procedures across your entire portfolio, which is very difficult to do when your sites are doing their own thing. Third, with all of that spend data in one place you can conduct spend analytics and spend management. Lastly, if the Procure to Pay system is properly integrated with an invoice processing system, you can have a true paperless process from beginning to end.” Yardi clients Arcadia Management Group (Gary Shaw) and Post Properties (Janet Ham) describe their positive experiences using the product as part of the presentation. Watch the complete video...

Yardi® clients can now easily access thousands of The Home Depot® products either in store or online with a click of a button via the online procurement system offered with Yardi Procure to Pay™, a fully automated end-to-end procurement and invoice processing platform. The Home Depot has set the standard for innovative merchandise for both the do-it-yourselfer and the professional contractor and its global customer base also encompasses commercial and multifamily property owners and managers. The Yardi Procure to Pay system enables The Home Depot purchase orders and invoices to flow through an automated, customized online approval workflow, giving property owners and managers insight into all purchases and ensuring complete purchasing compliance. For clients currently using Yardi PAYscan™, access to The Home Depot catalog is available at no additional cost and no implementation is required. In addition to online purchasing, registered clients can also walk into any of The Home Depot’s nearly 2,000 locations in the U.S. to make in-store purchases. Those purchases automatically update online purchase orders and are invoiced through Yardi Procure to Pay. “We are thrilled about our new business relationship with Yardi. Property managers now have a compliant ordering solution with the option of selecting same-day, in-store pickup or even delivery from The Home Depot,” said J.T. Rieves, vice president of The Home Depot Pro Business. “The Home Depot will leverage its thousands of U.S. locations, vast distribution network and outside sales team to become a strategic supplier of maintenance, repair and operating supplies and building materials for our very important property management customers.” “The Home Depot’s impressive catalog of products and resources is a major addition to our national network of partners, and further expands Yardi Procure to Pay to be a true one-stop solution for MRO supplies with...