Senior Living AP

Cascadia Saves Days of Work

By Nik Edlinger on Aug 13, 2020 in News

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 run, and everything worked great,” said Shefter. Two months later, they’d successfully implemented the solution at all 13 communities.

For the executive directors, the process for submitting invoices stayed the same, so no re-training was needed. But for the accounts payable manager in the corporate office, things changed in a big way – for the better. “She used to spend six days a month stuffing envelopes. With Bill Pay, we’ve found efficiencies where we can really reallocate what she’s doing. Six days a month. That’s been a huge success,” said Shefter. “She loves it.”

Next steps for Cascadia

Moving forward, Shefter says they plan to institute a minimum check amount in their AP process. Any check under a certain dollar threshold would be automatically routed through approvals and paid. Cascadia is also looking at bringing VendorCafe into the mix. VendorCafe would give frequent vendors an online portal to upload invoices, which would then flow directly into Voyager for faster approvals.

Given the success Cascadia has already seen with Yardi Bill Pay, Schefter is positive about the opportunities ahead, and he believes the solution could help other senior living providers accomplish the same. “Bill Pay is a huge time-saver. It frees team members up to do more important work,” said Shefter.

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Interested in streamlining your accounts payable in senior living? Attend a webinar on Yardi Bill Pay to learn more or get in touch to schedule a live demo.