How a Real Estate Firm Processed 82% Payables Faster With Property Expense Automation
Industry: Real Estate
Service: Property Expense Payables Automation
Client Background
The client is a mid-sized real estate investment and property management company in the USA, overseeing more than 40 residential and commercial properties across multiple states. Each property generated recurring monthly expenses for utilities, repairs, landscaping, cleaning, HVAC services, and contractor work.
With hundreds of invoices coming in every month from different locations and vendors, the AP team was stretched thin. As the portfolio expanded, the manual approach became slow, error-prone, and difficult to track. This affected financial transparency, approval timelines, and vendor relationships.
Challenges
- High volume of recurring property expenses: Each property generated 20–50 monthly invoices, creating delays, duplicate payments, and missed entries.
- Inconsistent invoice submission: Vendors sent invoices through email, paper mail, WhatsApp and text messages, making tracking difficult and causing missing documents.
- Budget control issues: Property managers could not easily compare actual spending against budgets, leading to overspending.
- Slow approvals: Multi-level approvals involving property managers, supervisors and finance caused delays of 10–18 days.
- Audit and compliance gaps: No central digital archive existed for invoice history, approval proof or supporting documents.
How Did APS Help?
- Unified vendor submission portal – APS team deployed a centralized portal where all vendors uploaded invoices digitally, eliminating scattered communication and missing files.
- Automated invoice capture and categorization – Using property-specific rules, APS experts automated the categorization of invoices into utilities, landscaping, repairs, cleaning, security and more, reducing manual entry and improving accuracy.
- Property-level approval workflows – Customized workflows designed by the APS team ensured each invoice moved automatically to the correct property manager and then to finance for final approval.
- Budget vs. actual expense dashboard – Real-time dashboards gave property managers and leadership immediate visibility into each property’s spending patterns, helping prevent cost overruns.
- Centralized digital archive – All invoices, contracts and approval histories were stored in one organized system for easy access during audits.
Results Achieved
- Processing speed improved by 82%, reducing turnaround from 10–18 days to 3–5 days.
- Manual errors dropped by 90% due to automated categorization and validations.
- 100% of invoices flowed through a single submission system, improving traceability.
- Real-time visibility into property-level spend helped prevent budget overruns.
- Vendor satisfaction increased due to consistent and timely payments.
- Audit readiness strengthened with complete digital documentation and approval trails.
As a result, the firm gained:
- Fully streamlined AP operations across all properties.
- Better transparency and control over recurring monthly expenses.
- Lower risk of missed, miscoded or duplicate payments.
- Stronger collaboration between property managers and finance teams.
- A scalable AP system that supports future portfolio growth.
In summary
APS transformed the client’s property expense payables from a fragmented, manual process into an automated and insight-driven function. With faster processing, cleaner data and full visibility across all properties, the real estate firm now operates with stronger financial control and a more efficient, scalable AP workflow.