The Problem: Manual Effort Taking Valuable Time and Holding Back Performance
Apartment Life is a non-profit organization serving 600 apartment communities and millions of residents throughout the U.S. With the goal of enabling the “love thy neighbor” principle, Apartment Life is contracted by apartment communities to build a true sense of community and host events, all on site.
While Clayman and her team were already using Intacct’s available accounts receivable module, they still found themselves doing an enormous amount of manual work. For instance, each month they would download aging data and two team members would both spend a full day creating emails with invoices, sending out reminders, individually marking accounts as paid, updating bank account information and creating custom payment plans and the reminders for those.
The Apartment Life team knew this amount of manual work wouldn’t be sustainable and couldn’t grow with the organization’s expansion to even more apartment communities. But after looking at multiple options, they couldn’t find a solution that would cover all the bases–until they found Invoiced.
The Solution: Invoiced’s A/R Cloud
Clayman and her team learned about Invoiced at an Intacct event; in doing their technical due diligence, the team realized that not only could they eliminate much of the manual A/R and collections work they were doing, but they could also provide an even better experience to their clients; plus they’d have vastly more visibility into key A/R metrics and performance with Invoiced’s included dashboard and reporting capabilities.
First, Apartment Life relied on Invoiced to create custom statement and invoice templates that matched their look and feel and presented billing information clearly and professionally. But that was just the start. Apartment Life also made extensive use of Invoiced’s Smart Chasing engine, which let them create custom dunning cadences - no more downloading aging and spending days each month sending out notifications and reminders.
The team was also able to streamline all the work that went into installment arrangements by using Invoiced’s automated payment plans. What’s more, they were able to provide a collections dashboard to their regional leaders, keeping them in the know and on top of their own collections tasks.
And for customers, Apartment Life was able to provide an improved experience with a branded payment portal that made it a breeze to view and pay bills as well as manage payment methods, installment plan details and more - all online and without tying up Apartment Life staff.
Perhaps most importantly, all of Invoiced’s features and data integrated seamlessly with Sage Intacct, eliminating the need for double entry or manually keeping datasets in sync between the two systems.
The Results: Dramatic A/R Performance Improvements and Time Savings
The apartment industry traditionally has a slow payment cycle, and most businesses don’t start aging follow up until 60 days. That’s why Apartment Life was ecstatic to drive a 50% decrease in 60 day+ accounts within the first quarter of using Invoiced–and they’ve sustained that performance improvement.
In addition, by automating dunning, aging reporting and payment plan management, Clayman estimates that implementing Invoiced has saved Apartment Life 5-6 business days each month on manual effort.
Now with Invoiced in place, Apartment Life has improved its A/R performance, spared its team from days of manual work each month and provided a better customer experience for its growing client base.