The Client: A leading real estate management company that acquired and managed more than 10,000 single-family homes in the state of Maryland.
Challenge: The real estate company have thousands of scheduled payments, AP, AR and payment adjustments to make which eats away the majority of their time at hand. The total Accounts Payable bills stand at 1500/day – a big number for an in-house team that has to balance both their core and accounting work.
As the bills arrive in different formats from different locations, the Real Estate Company suffered trouble paying the vendors on time due to delayed processing. These complex tasks that run in thousands resulted in decreased accuracy, increased errors and delayed processing. It costed hundreds of hours to get them processed manually. The lack of visibility made it easy to miss and misplace an invoice that doubled the time to successfully process an invoice.
The in-house team was robbed valuable time that is to be spent on strategy. Almost all of the early discounts were missed and the delayed processing even resulted in strained relationships with the vendors. Though the in-house team at the management company has done an adequate job with limited time and resources at hand, the management company was aiming for a more streamlined, smooth and accurate process.
Automation was the key but with their in-house department neck deep in their work. The management company plans to further acquire and expand their operations which meant more AP work, increase complexity, amplified errors and tons of dedicated time. So the company was looking for a remote accounting firm that can help them smoothly accomplish the goals in the given time frame.
Goals:
- Faster Processing
- High accuracy and ownership of the process.
- End-to-end complete management
- Improved vendor relations
Solution:
The first step we have taken towards automation is to get all the manual copies scanned to convert them into digitized e-bills. The scanned copies uploaded were fed into our OCR system which captured and categorized the information accurately. Our AP specialists oversaw the complete process – handled the exceptional cases and quickly verified them for accuracy.
The vendors were periodically contacted to send their invoices directly to Bill.com id to enable faster processing. The invoices were all digitized, and 1500 invoices were quickly processed every day by our dedicated AP resources by the end of that particular day. Having a convenient time gap helped us process all the invoices by the time our US team reported back to work in the morning. The only help we needed from their end is the scanning of the physical invoice copies which were scanned by our OCR for data extraction. Over time we persuaded the vendors to send e-bills to cut down this manual scanning as well. And this helped us completely own the end-to-end invoice processing with our dedicated resources and AP automating tools.
Results: All the 1500 AP bills are processed with the highest accuracy in a shorter time. Being in a convenient time-zone, meant that the processed bills are ready for review and payment without any risk or delay. As the bills slowly were transformed into e-bills, the processing from our end was blazing fast all while being smooth and seamless. This helped the real estate management company to conveniently scale its operations without a second thought about the amplified accounting work. With a full-scale team of Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivables, Bookkeeping & Tax preparation experts Outsourced Bookkeeping provided comprehensive accounting help as their preferred remote accounting firm.
What our client said:
“Outsourced Bookkeeping helped us automate our end-to-end AP process which was our aim for a long time now. The work was flawless with a fast turnaround time and this helped us improve our visibility, control and decision-making. Scaling our operations became an easy task with their remote accounting support”