Vets Pets
“All the costs of paper, stamps and the time that was spent on approving invoices and mailing them out — all those costs are now washed away. In a way, we have not paid for AvidXchange in the year and a half that we’ve had it. Plus, we don’t have to keep adding new headcount to our team as we grow. In both of those ways, it’s become a profit center for us.”
Vets Pets
Vets Pets provides practice management to veterinarians in North Carolina, including operations management, HR support, continued education and access to advanced technologies and resources. By managing the business and practice growth it enables veterinarians to focus on caring for their clients and their pets.
Blair Myers joined Vets Pets in 2019 as a Controller, but quickly rose in the ranks to become Vice President of Finance and Accounting. Her continuous drive for improvement led the company to adopt AvidXchange as its AP (Accounts Payable) automation solution to help streamline processes, save time and ditch the paper checks and Post-its for good. This allowed the finance department to contribute to Vets Pets’ growth, instead of holding it back.
Accounting bottleneck
Prior to joining Vets Pets, Myers worked at bigger companies where everything in the finance department was automated — to an extent. This was a sharp contrast to the paper checks and Post-it notes the Vet Pets team relied on.
“We were manually cutting checks for each invoice, and I had to hand sign all of them,” said Myers. “It was about 60 checks per week, which would take several hours to review and sign. Then it took our AP specialist even more time to mail the checks to the vendors. It was a long, drawn-out process.”
However, Myers says the biggest challenge was that they were affecting the growth of the company.
Myers knew Vets Pets was adding new hospitals to its network, which meant more invoices to pay, so she harnessed her love of continuous improvement to find a solution.
“I heard from people that accounting was a bottleneck to growth, so I came in and said, ‘how can we stop that?’”
Seamless transition to automated AP
After visiting the Sage Intacct Conference, Myers found three AP Automation companies to evaluate, but she says AvidXchange’s full-circle solution made it a “no-brainer” — and she was over the manual process they were doing every week.
“The main reason we went with AvidXchange was that it was a full-circle platform, meaning it could take the invoices, we could review and approve, and then payment would also happen through AvidXchange,” said Myers. “We also liked the fact that it automatically attached the invoice when it is posted in Intacct.”
Vet Pets’ transition to automated AP was seamless, which Myers credits to the implementation specialist who helped her team every step of the way and answered all their questions. She said her team only had to complete a few steps such as adding locations and bank accounts.
Helping the company grow
Myers and her team have experienced a handful of benefits since making the switch to automated AP, including the ability to pay vendors faster.
“Before AvidXchange, I would have to pay invoices for our largest vendor with my company credit card, which had a $250k limit,” said Myers. “Our bill was always over that, so I would pay a portion of the bill, pay off the credit card, and then pay the remainder of the bill. It was definitely a headache on both sides. Now, they send us the bill and they get paid in full the day after they send it.”
They’ve also saved time by setting up approval limits that eliminate the need for Myers to approve every invoice, typing comments right onto the invoice in the platform, rather than relying on those pesky post-it notes, and reviewing invoices and payments online, at home.