Carmel Partners

OpsTechnology and Carmel Partners

Situation

Carmel Partners, a premier national full-service real estate company based in the Bay Area, operates an extensive network of residential properties in Washington, DC, Northern and Southern California, Denver and Seattle. The company was losing time and money due to an paper-based, mail-intensive invoicing process that required property managers to manually code, and approve invoices prior to sending them through the mail to a centralized processing center in San Bruno, California, where the accounts payable department would then cut checks. The checks then would have to be sent to Denver or San Francisco to be signed by Carmel Property executives. Only then could the checks be sent out to the original vendors. This complex mix of emails, faxes, and snail mail was costing far too much time and money.

Solution

Carmel executives looked at several software applications to better streamline its invoicing process and found OpsTechnology’s OpsInvoice Processing Service to be the perfect fit. "OpsInvoice offered us a chance to cut that paper trail almost all the way out, which is what was taking so much time. We also licensed the eProcurement features that manage our purchasing and helps us control spending directly," says Roy Chiappari, Controller for Carmel. "Now our vendors send their invoices directly to OpsTechnology instead of to our properties, and Ops does the rest. All we need to do is approve the invoices for payment. The system - which is integrated directly with MRI - sends the documents for payment. In addition, all of our invoice images are available to retrieve directly on the Web by any user that has permission."

OpsInvoice Processing Service lets real estate operating companies streamline the payables process by eliminating the need to enter, approve, transport and store invoices. OpsInvoice Processing Service leverages the features and functions of the OpsBuyer application to track and process invoices based on your company's business rules. From budget and spending controls to a robust reporting engine, OpsBuyer provides your organization with a complete on-demand payables and purchasing solution to manage your expenses. We let you track every invoice through a secure Web-based service, eliminating the delays and high costs of paper-based systems

Bottom-Line Results

Because the invoices are scanned, anyone from Carmel can check on the status of any invoice through their Web browser. This allows the executives who sign the checks to do so within hours instead of days and weeks. "We now process more than 1000 invoices a week using OpsInvoice," Chiappari says. "We no longer have to keep physical copies of invoices because they are all stored online. We’ve also been able to move our AP person into a higher-level role because we no longer have the need to manage all of the paper invoices. It’s definitely helping our growth."