Following the “Paperless” Trail....
Special Accounting Project Manager Terri Garnick leads a flexible “tiger team” of professionals who handle strategic process and technology improvement projects within this leading commercial real estate firm’s accounting group. We recently interviewed Terri about her experience selecting and implementing rCash’s PAY solution for accounts payable automation.

How is technology a differentiator for Glenborough?
We’re always trying to be as efficient as possible, and make key information as readily accessible to our employees and customers as we can. We’re slightly conservative with our decisions — we don’t want to be in the forefront of technology, but we still want to be on the leading edge when it comes to getting business value out of our systems. We’re always listening to new ideas and capabilities out there, and we’ve been frustrated by some of our manual A/P processes. Since we knew it could provide a big return to make the change to rCash PAY, selecting it was a pretty easy decision for us.

What were some of the A/P issues you faced?
The biggest negative was that we were manually pushing around a lot of paper. We are very centralized in terms of back office, and we do all of our accounting here in San Mateo. But our many vendors have relationships with our field offices that manage property all over the country, so that is where they usually mail their bills. Then the field offices would manually code them, copy them, then bundle them into a package and mail them to San Mateo for processing.

The field was being bogged down by the manual process of coding and copying so they’d have a point of reference with their vendors. It was cumbersome. We were looking for a way to speed up the A/P process, have a better handle on what was paid or unpaid, and have the documentation more readily accessible. Now everyone with permission has access to the data and invoice images online, which is much faster than walking over to the cabinet to dig for the invoice in the batches if a vendor calls for payment status or an audit needs to get done.

Why did you select rCash PAY?
We’ve already had a long experience of working with rCash products for many years. We use rCash’s CTI and INSIGHT for much of our property management and reporting needs, and of course we use ARGU More recently we started using COLLECT to automate collections and save lockbox costs.

Once we did have a similar product come in for a demo, but I can’t even remember its name. It didn’t make a lot of sense for us to go with a vendor that wasn’t real estate-centric and didn’t integrate with CTI. PAY was completely integrated with our current processes, so it was extremely painless for us to go with rCash. And it was priced to better meet our needs.

Was Sarbanes-Oxley a reason for moving to PAY?
Sarbanes-Oxley wasn’t a deciding factor in our selection process. We had good internal controls and good systems in place already, so it was mostly just the efficiency of PAY to us. We used to manually collect rent and batch paper invoices, and send a lot of costly overnight packages, so it was the fact that we could continue our same business practices and controls while improving the bottom line that made it easier to go with PAY.

How did the implementation of PAY go for your team?
It went well. PAY took more work for us to roll out than COLLECT. Unlike checks and incoming payments, which are rather uniformly structured, vendor invoices can come in all varieties. So there were a few more training issues and procedural decisions to be made, as well as vendors to set up with bill boxes. It took us a little while to figure out how we wanted to compile all the unique vendor billing numbers and set them all up within our CTI accounting system.

The consulting team is excellent, and rCash’s people are top-notch. It went smoothly, and our field staff absolutely LOVES rCash PAY. Our central office took a little more up-front effort for the conversion, due to the factors I mentioned.

How are you rolling out the solution to the field?
We flew in all our personnel to two locations, on the West Coast and the East Coast, for three days of intense hands-on training. These are field people who know property management, but who aren’t consistently computer-savvy. We provided them all with practical A/P examples and had them do a lot of input. It was pretty intensive, but it went really well, and everyone migrated
fairly easily.

What are your success expectations for using PAY?
We’re always looking to save money. Thanks to automation, we laid off four people in our central office. We didn’t lay anyone off in the field, but we’re hoping that we freed them up from paperwork to really concentrate more on their tenants and leasing, and less on accounting and paperwork.

With PAY, we have a much better handle on where our payables are. We previously felt a risk that a property manager could get left behind and they weren’t processing their payables consistently enough. Maybe they were letting their mail sit in a drawer for a couple of days, or forgetting about certain invoices that can become late.

We get a lot of comfort out of PAY in that there’s no chance of that delay happening. We have a good handle on what is out there in the system. Our invoices don’t get lost in PAY, and we always have a backup.

How has the experience of working with rCash been?
They’re good people. I’m a No. 1 fan of rCash. We’ve had really good experiences with all of the people there. I’m very happy with their services and technology, and I think everyone here that works with rCash would say the same thing. rCash’s support is very responsive and knowledgeable, and I have no complaints.