6 Ways to Control Multifamily Expenses From Source to Pay

1. Map a strategic buyer journey

A strategic buyer journey starts with centralizing and consolidating all purchasing, invoicing and vendor engagement processes from sourcing to procurement to payment. And it must deliver timely data insights across your entire multifamily portfolio.

Centralization and automation can enable you to:

• Manage vendors more effectively, including vendor credentialing
• Maximize purchasing power
• Keep property spend under control
• Stay ahead with actionable data insights

2. Create procurement, purchasing and invoice process efficiencies

Optimizing procurement, purchasing and invoice process efficiencies can get much easier when implementing an end-to-end procurement and purchasing solution. Such software can reduce invoice processing costs, eliminate paper invoices for vendors and help you gain greater control over purchasing, invoicing and vendor management processes.

Optimally, an expense management solution should facilitate back-office consolidation, including purchase orders, invoice entry, advanced approval workflows and reporting with actionable insights. It should also be capable of integrating with your existing accounting software.

3. Adjust your procurement process

How well do you know the vendors from which you purchase supplies and parts? And how many times does your staff procure parts from vendors you’ve never worked with before? Are you purchasing at the best possible prices? You can reduce your risk by implementing a solution that enables you to tap into a marketplace of vetted vendors.

You should also be able to search by category, location and other criteria for instant results and browse through bios, photos and videos.

4. Focus on vendor credentialing

Managing vendors requires more than performing background checks. Without the right solution, the vetting process can be tedious and complex. Missteps and errors can lead to increased expenses, risk and fraud. You need a full-service vendor credentialing solution that can be customized to your unique business requirements. And you should be able to work only with those vendors that meet your compliance specifications.

In addition, a vendor credentialing solution should allow you the flexibility to set insurance requirements at the company or property level and should enable visibility into vendor compliance status, success metrics, background checks and risk levels. A comprehensive performance profile will enable you to reduce costs related to vendor liability risk and can help ensure compliance.

5. Manage and modernize vendor payments

If you still pay vendors with checks, your team spends too much time processing paper. A source-to-pay software platform can help you shift to a modern, digital vendor payment solution that automates and manages the entire vendor process. You’ll reduce expenses and eliminate paper check usage that is prone to errors due to slow manual processes.

Here’s an extra tip: ensure that the solution delivers real-time visibility into payment status and can be integrated with your existing accounting software.

6. Leverage group purchasing and access actionable insights

The adage “There is power in numbers” plays out well when you can join hundreds of other property management companies in leveraging group purchasing. It’s the most cost-efficient way to procure the best products from vetted vendor partners at the lowest prices.

You’ll also need insights and analytics that are critical for improving decision making and uncovering vendor usage trends. The solution you implement should, therefore, also provide you with:

• Quarterly purchasing efficiency and purchasing power reporting includes an in-depth analysis of the overall spend profile and process performance with metrics specific to property operations and utilized vendors
• Spend dashboards and widgets that provide benchmark performance metrics and reports on purchasing efficiency, including a three-way match of contracts, orders and invoices to control and influence spend patterns
• Visibility and reporting on vendor compliance and master agreements
• Integrations with budgets and forecasting to help control site spend with real-time reports

RealPage Source to Pay

The RealPage Source to Pay Platform has all the features and capabilities you need to gain better control of expenses, from parts sourcing to product procurement to vendor invoicing to vendor payment. Source to Pay shepherds the buying journey with timely insights across your entire portfolio.

RealPage Spend Management, the core of the Source to Pay Platform, is an end-to-end procurement and purchasing solution. It consolidates and centralizes the source-to-pay journey and simplifies purchasing, invoicing and vendor engagement processes to reduce invoice processing costs and eliminate paper invoices and checks. Add vendor credentialing to your source-to-pay strategy to minimize vendor liability and risk.

Source to Pay integrates with RealPage Accounting for a streamlined, holistic experience. And because it’s platform-agnostic, it also integrates with third-party solutions, including Yardi, MRI, Entrata and more.

Learn more about RealPage Source to Pay

Learn more about RealPage’s Source to Pay Platform by watching our on-demand webcast.