The Client:  Our client is a leading real estate and property Management Company based in Atlanta, GA that manages more than 5500 single homes in the southeast. Our client offers professional property management services for landlords and investors in residential real estate.

Our Client’s Challenge:  Managing the day-to-day management from day-one, our client takes a huge burden off the investors/landlords and provides a hassle-free experience. Our client particularly specializes in providing comprehensive assets and property management services for more than 5500 single homes and hence takes care of a major chunk of back office operations.

Over time, our client is swamped with accounting bottlenecks that thwarted the operations of several points in their workflow. The client began to face a variety of problems with billing, payment processing, and overall accounts payable management.

Payment of utility bills such as lease rentals, preparation of journals of purchase, and sale of HUDs, invoices, work orders, pest control, and vendor’s reconciliation became part of the problem which started riling up on top of each other. Though the client leverages Porpetyware.com, the sheer volume of total documentation reduced their automation capabilities as the bills are not digital-ready. Every day, the department has more than 1000 accounts payable bills that need to be made digital-ready to leverage the automation software and process their AP work.

The Context of the Challenge: Accounts Payable in the property management and real estate sector brings up a slew of challenges in managing Accounts Payable while costing them a lot of time and accounting debt. Not only the volume of invoices is heavy, but they also involve large sums of money in addition to a lot of menial sums.

Majority of property management firms are also short staffed and on top of this, they are also expected to spend a part of their time outside as a part of their job. The approval cycle of Accounts Payable is complex and a multi-layered affair which naturally makes the whole process ambiguous – a perfect combination for lack of control and visibility. Though automation can solve the problem, the heavy volume of invoices of a property management firm arrives in different formats. The ability to perfectly leverage the automation part of the AP is mitigated by the lack of the right resources to convert them into e-invoices. The fact that invoices arrive in different type of formats further aggravate the problem.

As a remote accounting firm specialising in real estate accounts payable services, Back Office Accountants has helped many businesses overcome these challenges. We have quickly identified the core goals of the client and assembled a dedicated team of AP professionals to offer a custom solution in alignment with the client’s expectations and goals.

The Goals:  

  • Faster & error-free digital-ready invoices.
  • Quick turn-around-time & overnight completion.
  • Standard end-to-end process that can scale at will.

The Solution Offered by Back Office Accountants:

Back Office Accountants is equipped with cutting-edge OCR tools that are powered by AI to further simplify the digital-ready process. As the invoice arrives in different types of formats, error-free processing is to have human monitoring and supervision.

By dividing the entire process into sizeable chunks we assigned manual resources at each step of the process to ensure the right accuracy of the billing process. We have developed a standard operating procedure that can process 1000 accounts payable bills/invoices in a record short time while working concurrently on HUDs, HOA and more. The time-zone difference meant a swift completion of all the processing work well before the opening hours of the client in their Atlanta office.

The digitization of invoice data for loading into cloud computing tools is relatively easy with a dedicated team of AP professionals. However, our USP lies in designing a standard system that can quickly scale up as needed while offering industry-best accuracy at an unbeatable price point.

If you are a real estate business that is facing similar or different Accounts Payable challenges our professionals can quickly provide the right solution for you at a fraction of the price.

You can know more about our Accounts Payable Services for real estate businesses here: https://www.backofficeaccountants.com/accounts-payable-for-real-estate/