BACKGROUND
Kolter Hospitality is an industry leader in hotel management and development, with a reputable and award-winning portfolio of hotels in Florida’s most thriving markets. From the company’s inception in 2014, everything from an AP and payments standpoint was being processed using paper checks.
While their business was experiencing rapid growth and success, their accounts payable process was lacking a higher-level efficiency they knew they needed.
Somebody was required to be at their desk processing the paper, monitoring the check stock, and changing the printer toner. A two-signer check policy also required that they locate the appropriate and authorized managers to manually sign each check before mailing the payments. The incidence of lost checks in the mail was also costing the AP department a significant amount of time and money.
“We wasted so many hours each month on the manual process of printing and mailing paper checks.” said Mark Roland, VP of Accounting & Finance. “Our team was inundated with tracking down missing or delayed vendor payments on a daily basis, but we just accepted it as normal business practice.”
When Mark and his team discovered CSI and learned how the CSI Paysystems electronic payments platform could streamline their AP processes, the decision to make the transition was immediate.
“In the beginning we thought the initial savings would be time-focused but once we started using CSI Paysystems we quickly saw the additional cost savings as well as a new revenue stream in the form of a rebate.”
SOLUTION
Kolter Hospitality uses the M3 Accounting Software, which integrates seamlessly with CSI Paysystems. They were able to make the transition and effectively start making electronic vendor payments within 30 days, requiring just one GoToMeeting per property for training.
For Mark and his team, the ultimate goal was to move as far away from paper checks as possible and get all of their vendors enrolled to accept electronic payments. CSI assists in this effort with ongoing vendor enrollment initiatives.
“A major advantage to working with CSI has been their continual commitment to working with vendors on our behalf. They proactively reach out to those still using paper checks and educate them on the benefits of electronic payments.”