Handling payables is an important role for real estate managers and can certainly
be cumbersome:
- High invoice volume per property
- Invoice receipt at multiple locations
- Tracking down and researching the status of invoices
- Ensuring all required invoice approvals are made
Most property management companies have a process in place to manage receipt of
invoices at their various property locations, as well as their corporate office.
Typically this involves on-site managers extracting, reviewing, and forwarding the
invoice received on-site to corporate. Payables Lockbox allows management companies
to have a central location where the extraction, sorting, and processing of invoices
can be done for them. This leaves managers and controllers with the simple process
of logging on to the Payables Lockbox site, reviewing the invoices waiting for their
approval, and authorizing them for payment.
For a property management company, there can be several people involved in the
accounts payable process. Typically, the manager on-site must review the invoice
and someone in the corporate office must also review and approve the invoice for
payment. There are also instances where invoices may need special approvals because
they are from a specific vendor or exceed a dollar amount. The Payables Lockbox
service accommodates each property’s current approval process online, and provides
controls to allow special approval routing depending on specific attributes of the
invoice, such as amount or vendor.
The property management industry is familiar with products like Receivables Lockbox,
ACH, and more recently, Remote Deposit Capture, to more easily collect rent from
tenants. Payables Lockbox is now being offered through banks as a Treasury Management
product to provide similar efficiencies to the Accounts Payable process. The benefit
for the property management company is that they can leverage the large deposit
volume they probably carry with the bank to help offset costs of the service. Please
contact us or your banking relationship manager to see if Payables Lockbox is offered
through your bank.