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...

Paying for the materials and services that keep a property running smoothly has never been simpler or more convenient. That’s because Yardi Bill Pay now allows payments with Mastercard-branded virtual credit cards. Property managers can execute the entire vendor payment transaction process with a single-use virtual card number. The process embeds transaction-level controls and leverages existing workflows, which saves time and money previously required to process paper checks, complete payment file uploads and retrain staff. Built into Yardi Voyager, the system requires no interaction with other data sources. Property managers gain full control and visibility over spend while avoiding per-transaction fees associated with checks and ACH. Vendors, who must be enrolled in VENDORCafé to participate in Yardi Bill Pay, get paid faster and simplify their reconciliations. “Mastercard is committed to provide secure, efficient and paperless payments for the property management industry,” said Marie Aloisi, Mastercard senior vice president, business development, U.S. “The Yardi Bill Pay solution, powered by Mastercard’s virtual cards, benefits supplier by providing faster payments and reconciliation tools to ensure a seamless experience for all parties.” “Users need only initiate a payment in Yardi Voyager and Yardi Bill Pay completes the entire paperless process. Vendors can earn preferred supplier designation, reduce the need for credit checks and collection efforts, improve their cash flow and shorten their days sales outstanding,” said Akshai Rao, vice president of Yardi Procure to Pay and Energy. Call 800-866-1144 for more information about Yardi Bill Pay and the Mastercard virtual credit...

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...

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...