Automated Check Runs, Instant Approvals, and Happier Vendors: The Future of AP at Country Clubs
by The Ottimate Editorial Team
At country clubs, compensating vendors can be a daunting task. There are suppliers for all the different lines of business, and each transaction must be processed, approved, and paid on time, taking into account cash flow. Vendors want to be paid in different ways that all require manual steps, and delays between invoice and payment processing are common. In this article, we’ll explore how an AP automation system creates end-to-end efficiencies, reduces manual work, and gives staff more time to focus on member services.
Automating Bill Payments
Located in the picturesque Waterton Canyon in Colorado, The Club at Ravenna is known for its beautiful location, five-star amenities, and exemplary customer service. The operations team is eager to apply the same excellence to finance, and initially selected Ottimate to eliminate the delays and headaches that manual invoice processing created. Stephanie Liby, Ravenna’s Accounting Manager, soon realized that her team could achieve similar efficiencies in payment processing with Ottimate VendorPay.
“Bill payment has also been streamlined the same way,” she said. “Every week, I just set up payments through a certain date. It’s pretty seamless. And like I mentioned, our CFO isn’t in the office a lot, so it’s great that she can approve those payments from anywhere. I just feel like it’s more efficient for everyone.”
Previously, it was a very different story. In the absence of a dedicated payment automation solution, Liby’s team used their ERP system to initiate check payments. While this offered some benefits, it still required assembling paper packets, hand-signing checks, and mailing payments – a time-consuming process that had to be repeated multiple times each month.
“Our bill pay process used to be just paying out of Jonas and printing checks,” Liby said. “We’d put a little packet together for our CFO to approve: we’d have the check on the front and the actual physical copy of the vendor invoice behind it. And then she would review and sign everything, and we would then put them in the mail. It was very manual before.”
Creating seamless, end-to-end AP processing
Ottimate has eliminated almost all manual steps from the payment process. This has enabled Liby to free up time for her team and take a significant burden from the CFO. An AP staff member can authorize payments and schedule check runs directly from the Ottimate dashboard. This ensures that Ravenna’s vendors are paid on time without requiring hours of manual tasks, data entry, and chasing down approvals.
“Now we do all of our bill payments through Ottimate,” Liby said. “It sends out the checks for us.”
With Ottimate, Ravenna has successfully bridged the gaps that used to exist between invoice and payment processing. Applying intelligence to both has created seamless, end-to-end AP automation that ensures bills are paid on time with less effort and greater accuracy than ever before.
“It’s been so much better getting everything on Ottimate,” Liby said. “[Managers] can approve invoices from their phone or wherever they are, and they can have vendors send bills directly to the platform. So it’s been a lot more efficient. I spend so much less time doing AP processing because of the transition to Ottimate.”
Simplifying and speeding check runs
As we shared in the first part of this article series, NorthStone Country Club in Huntersville, North Carolina, first selected Ottimate to streamline invoice processing, with a particular emphasis on intelligently mapping line items to the correct general ledger (GL) codes in the ERP system.
After a successful rollout in the food and beverage department and subsequent expansion into golf, administration, course maintenance, club operations, and other areas, NorthStone’s leadership team looked for other ways to apply the advantages of machine learning intelligence. They settled on VendorPay, Ottimate’s payment automation solution.
NorthStone uses Ottimate to compensate some suppliers via virtual card or ACH. Doing so improves security and reduces fraud risk because of Ottimate’s robust security features, and also facilitates faster remuneration. Many of their vendors still prefer to receive payment via check.
This used to be a headache for both the AP staff and departmental teams. Steve Foster, the Chief Financial Officer and Assistant General Manager at NorthStone, used to oversee complex check runs that required obtaining two signatures on 80 to 90 checks at a time. Once each one was signed, AP staff members put them in envelopes along with payment statements and mailed them to suppliers.
With Ottimate, check runs are automatically initiated twice a week without the need to put a stack of checks on an approver’s desk and wait for them to sign them before taking the same checks to another executive for a second signature.
“Paper is way down,” Foster said. “Before, we’d write that manual check, we’d multi-sign it, and then the stub of that check would get stapled to whatever invoices were being paid.”
Creating a single system of record for AP
Ottimate’s AI automatically updates the ERP system with payment details, and invoices are linked to checks and procurement documents, like POs, so that a complete record of the transaction is just a click away for authorized NorthStone staff. This makes it easy to see which items were ordered, their cost, and when they were paid for.
“Now, you just open Ottimate, you find whatever you want, whenever you want it, wherever you are,” Foster said. “If you’re on the beach, and somebody says, ‘Hey, did you buy a driver from Titleist on August 3?’ you just go look and see if you got it right. It’s just an incredible time saver to be able to just instantaneously find what you’re looking for, anywhere that you are. It becomes a system of record.”
For Foster, applying the AI-driven automation that Ottimate provides doesn’t merely save time but also enables faster payments and improves data accuracy. It also allows the NorthStone team to focus on what’s most crucial to the continued success of their business.
“I think that the more efficient we can be in things, like paying bills, the more time we have to spend with our members, which is where we make our money,” he said. “We’re in the people business. [Ottimate gives] time back to the department heads, so they can do what I think are important things. Spend time with your employees, spend time with your members, and we’ll all do really well.
”Want to see how Ottimate can optimize your payments process? Book a personalized demo now.