One of the biggest complaints when working with a property management or bookkeeping company is they are slow to pay vendor bills. This creates more work for the Board. The vendors call and ask for payment. The vendors stop working unless a payment is received and this causes problems especially when scheduling vendors around each other. One Board member complained that due to slow payments he had to beg the vendor to continue to work at their community. This causes stress. There has to be a faster way to pay vendors.
The reason payments are typically slow.
First, the frequency of bill payments at a company slows the process down. Bill payment can be a laborious process: receive, open, get approval, data enter, print payments, stuff envelopes, add postage, and mail. Because of the work involved, many do this weekly or every other week. On top of this, there can be delays in getting approvals from board members. Additionally, this assumes the vendor submits their bill in time, and perhaps the most critical part is that the post office has no delays.
We have a better process.
We allow vendors to email their bills into our system. This reduces the process by days.
Whether emailed or mailed into the system the invoice data like amount, date, vendor name, etc., are uploaded into our software daily by our partner without our staff having to data enter – saving a step and time.
Our team puts on the accounting code for the invoice and checks that the information is correct. Then it goes to two board members to approve. This online approval process adds transparency, checks and balances, expense control, and saves time.
All invoices are date-time stamped along the payment journey so we know where bottlenecks are.
Once approved we are paying bills DAILY not weekly or every other week.
The payment goes out by check or electronically. We just added that our payment partner will pay the vendor by ACH for an online payment that is delivered to their bank account within 3 business days. The ACH is paid by Community Financials as part of our fee (not charged to the vendor like most programs). This reduces the check mailing time.
We also allow some bills like insurance and some utility bills to be paid by bank draft so they are paid within 3 business days electronically as well.
We are here to help if slow bill payment is causing you stress or if you are looking to improve your payment process.