Yardi Bill Pay

How it can help

By Joel Nelson on Jan 11, 2019 in News

We recently caught up with Jesse Dowler, Client Services Division manager for residential clients of Yardi Bill Pay. He started his support career as a technical account manager at Yardi in 2009.

What is Yardi Bill Pay and what does it do for property managers?

Yardi Bill Pay is an optional element of the Yardi Procure to Pay Suite or the Yardi Payment Processing service, which outsources to Yardi the process of paying vendors. The Bill Pay team at Yardi pulls invoices from the client’s Yardi Voyager database, routes them through the client’s approval workflow, and pays the vendor by the client’s preferred method—ACH, electronic funds transfer, credit card or paper check.

Why do clients want to adopt Yardi Bill Pay?

Processing invoices and going through all the steps to complete payments take a lot of time and labor. Check printers are expensive too. When you’re going through thousands of invoices a month, those expenses add up fast. It’s easier to let Yardi do it all. Not only does Yardi relieve the manual labor, but our check printing is less expensive as well, for clients choosing that option. About 40% of Bill Pay clients prefer checks so that’s still a popular payment method.

What point do you and the Bill Pay team emphasize when discussing Bill Pay with clients and prospects?

A major proposition for Bill Pay is its integration with Voyager and the workflows established there.  Clients continue to use the Commit Payment and Process Payment screens as they are accustomed to, and once payments are processed in Voyager, Yardi Bill Pay steps in and handles the movement of the actual cash, including check printing and sending ACH instructions to banking institutions.

How did Yardi Bill Pay evolve?

A small team at Yardi started building it in 2016 as part of the expansion of electronic payment technology, so it’s still fairly new.

How has it been received in the marketplace?

Our clients are very excited about it, and they especially like the option for credit card payments, which often include rebates. Our client base has grown by more than 650% since 2017.

What factors might accelerate the adoption of Yardi Bill Pay?

Real estate companies need all the productivity they can get from their current resources. They want to handle more invoices without adding accounts payable staff or overhead. Bill Pay adds productivity by taking over the time-consuming tasks of printing and mailing checks or generating and uploading ACH files to the bank, thereby expanding AP capabilities without adding resources. The ability to accommodate every payment method adds to its attractiveness.

What is Yardi’s Bill Pay team?

I oversee eight dedicated CSD team members in California, and North Carolina from Yardi’s office in Oxnard, Calif. Our support includes presales consultations and product demonstrations as well as implementation and ongoing user assistance. We log in daily to all Bill Pay client accounts, process pending invoices and send them to banking institutions.