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...