In this episode of Raising Tech, our host, Patrick Leonard, has a great conversation with Scott Martinez, Chief Financial Officer for Juliette Fowler Communities, and John Zaudtke, Vice President of Sales for Paymerang, about how Juliette Fowler Communities has streamlined their processes and maximized efficiency by utilizing Paymerang's financial automation solutions.
Learn more about Juliette Fowler Communities while also discovering how Paymerang's financial automation solutions can help automate the role of CFO at Senior Living communities, allowing them to save financial resources and time.
Raising Tech is powered by Parasol Alliance, The Strategic Planning & Full-Service IT Partner exclusively serving Senior Living Communities.
In this episode of Raising Tech, our host, Patrick Leonard, has a great conversation with Scott Martinez, Chief Financial Officer for Juliette Fowler Communities, and John Zaudtke, Vice President of Sales for Paymerang, about how Juliette Fowler Communities has streamlined their processes and maximized efficiency by utilizing Paymerang's financial automation solutions.
Learn more about Juliette Fowler Communities while also discovering how Paymerang's financial automation solutions can help automate the role of CFO at Senior Living communities, allowing them to save financial resources and time.
Raising Tech is powered by Parasol Alliance, The Strategic Planning & Full-Service IT Partner exclusively serving Senior Living Communities.
Welcome back to Raising Tech, a podcast about all things technology and senior living. I'm your host today, Patrick Leonard. I'm excited for today's discussion because we're bringing together guests from both a innovative technology solution as well as a senior living community operator to discuss the topic of finance automation. So, with that I'm excited to introduce our listeners to our guests, John Zaudtke from Paymerang and Scott Martinez from Juliette Fowler Communities. John and Scott, welcome to the show.
John Zaudtke:Thanks for having us, Patrick! Appreciate it.
Patrick Leonard:Absolutely. So like I mentioned, it's always fun when we have an innovative technology solution and a senior living product who's using that solution day-to-day in their operations of the community. So I'm really excited about our discussion and topic today. But before we really dive into everything, John , can you start things off by giving our listeners a little background about yourself and your role at Paymerang? I'll ask Scott to do the same.
John Zaudtke:Sure, Patrick. Afternoon, morning, wherever, whatever time it is you're listening to this. My name's John Zaudtke, I'm the Vice President of Sales here at Paymerang. Been with Paymerang now for, well, next month will be seven years. So, but in the payment space for total of 11. Here at Paymerang, we help automate the office of the CFO through an accounts payable automation product. So, you know, very similar to what ADP has done for payroll. Everyone knows ADP, that's a very common example. We do the same type of situation here on the accounts payable side . So helping communities receive, route, code, approve invoices, get them into their ERP, whether that's Business Central, MatrixCare, PointClickCare, whomever, NetSuite, and then ultimately the payments out on the backend, simple file export into our system for the payments we do all the enablement, all the payments, all the reconciliation, help protect against fraud. And we can talk more about that as we go. But just a little overview there of Paymerang really helping to automate the office of the CFO here for Senior Living communities.
Patrick Leonard:Awesome, thanks for that, John, and Scott, if you don't mind just doing a quick intro for yourself and kind of your role and a little bit about Juliette Fowler communities.
Scott Martinez:Yeah, absolutely. So Scott Martinez, I'm the CFO here at Juliette Fowler. I've been here for going on three years now and what Juliette Fowler communities as Patrick mentioned, we're in the senior living community on the not-for-profit side. We are in the space of everything from market rate independent living all the way through assisted living memory care and on the affordable side in both independent living and assisted living as well. So for a business like ours, you know, partnerships and products like Paymerang that help to automate some of those functions for the business office become key in helping us scale. Like I said, I've been with Fowler for three years but I've been in the healthcare space for almost 15, and I can say that ever since I've been in various levels of finance roles in healthcare, that's always been something we're looking to do, automate and streamline the more routine pieces of process so we can shift our resources more to problem solving. So that's, you know, what we continuously look to do here at Fowler and that's what my team's always crunched strive for .
John Zaudtke:You have a good point there, Scott. I mean we hear it all the time from CFOs, controllers, etc. In the business office. I'm always being told what can I automate? Go automate, go automate the labor shortage the way it is. We're always hearing that and and we're happy to be able to partner with you and help in that manner.
Patrick Leonard:Yeah, absolutely. So on that topic, obviously we have two people who have a lot of background in this space, so no better two people to talk about this today but we hear about automation used in so many different use cases across the board today and it's coming more and more common in senior living communities. You know, finance automation might not be something who's someone who's not in finance doesn't talk about quite a bit. So John , do you mind just from a high level telling us a little bit, what does finance automation actually mean to the lay person and what problem is it really trying to solve for senior living communities today?
John Zaudtke:Yeah, again, I'll go back to the example I used earlier with payroll , right? That's one form of finance automation. It is really getting some of those more manual paper-based operations that handled within a business office and getting them automated , right? 10, 15 years ago people had no idea payroll wasn't broken. So they put in, but they started looking at ADP because that automates that process. It makes that process simpler. Very similar situation here. Like I mentioned before with Paymerang and just other organizations like us, it's automating some of those tedious tasks. Scott mentioned it before, let's get rid of the tedious paper heavy intensive processes that are in the business office. Let's automate them, turn them into an electronic format so they can focus on the higher level problem, strategic thinking issues within the office and the community as opposed to okay, let me get this paper circulated, let me get this check signed, stuffed mailed, reconciled, followed up on . It's getting all of those paper products and processes into an electronic format.
Patrick Leonard:Makes sense. And so Scott, are most senior living communities leveraging something like this, what are people doing if they're not using automation here? How did you kind of know at Juliette Fowler communities, and I'm not sure if you were using Paymerang before you got there or not, but from your perspective, when do you know it's time to leverage a tool like this and can you talk a little bit more about how your teams are responding to that?
Scott Martinez:Yeah, absolutely. So I would say that I don't believe a lot of communities in the senior living, specifically in the not-for-profit space are using payment automation today. And I think it's probably more from lack of awareness and then also the belief of the difficulty and the barriers to entry. What I will say with that, just real quickly on Paymerang is that they've helped make that process pretty streamlined. You know, we went live in less than two months and that was on our old outdated ERP system Great Plains and when we converted over to Business Central it was a pretty smooth transition on their side. We've obviously still got some kinks with getting some data out of Business Central , but that's something we're working on ourselves and with the Paymerang team. So the reason that I wanted to look at it and the reason that I've looked at it in my previous healthcare experience as well is traditionally in the business space specifically, I mean acute care hospitals are a lot larger than a lot of our senior living facilities. So bigger teams it doesn't mean as much but when you get into something our size, you need a lot of flexibility and multiple capabilities from your teammates. So you can't just have someone following the traditional process of routing paper invoices, making sure everything's documented appropriately, you know, writing out checks and putting invoice numbers and all those things because that takes a lot of time. And traditionally that role has not been more of an entry level role and there's not been a lot of movement with people once they enter that role in their career path. So I look at it for two reasons from our perspective. Number one, I believe that every entry-level role is just at an entry-level role, and I want my teammates to be able to learn about the business and grow and be able to move and support us in other aspects of the business. So in doing that, that means you have to establish processes that are gonna be easily retrainable and repeatable. And so that became important to us. Number two is I'm not a fan of paper is the way I'll put it. I don't like anything being printed, I don't like anything being handed from one place to another. I like to see data touchpoints and that comes from being a CFO and being a financial-minded person and wanting to see KPIs and wanting to see how long it's taking us with each step of the process to see where we can improve things. But it comes a little bit with technology and the love for technology and the idea that we can be better, we could be more efficient in those things that we do.
Patrick Leonard:Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And obviously being a technology solutions company here at Parasol, we couldn't agree more. We're always, you know, going in and assessing different communities what the current state is of technology at the communities and there are just a lot of people, even if they have certain technology solutions that maybe aren't even just utilizing them properly and they're still doing things on paper so it causes double work, causes room for error and just a lot of wasted time and efficiencies that are wasted. So it's really refreshing to hear your perspective, especially in the seat you sit in to kind of provide that insight because it can seem I think, scary to some people who have been doing a certain way for so long. But I think once you start to make the jump and start taking little bites and chunks of progress forward, the long-term benefit is definitely worth it. So thanks for that perspective.
John Zaudtke:Scott, you talk about entry level and we see this a lot, we don't want to be a position elimination. There's still a very human element into automating any kind of process. Have you seen since implementing Paymerang, being able to have that AP person doing more for you and taking on other roles now they're not having to deal with the signing stuffing and mailing and reconciling of all those payments?
Scott Martinez:Oh a hundred percent, absolutely, and that's what we were looking for. So that's a topic that I didn't get into and I was just explaining earlier, but when you're looking at those entry-level positions and what normal pay range was in our state, it's towards the lower end and you can probably go get a job working at Buckee's or you know McDonald's or somewhere else and have less true responsibility, get paid more. In fact, I mean if you wanna work in other areas, there's a lot of now remote opportunities, you know, paying that same pay to not have you come in on-site every day . So the traditional AP paper process started to struggle long before because it's getting new people into the field and the younger generations are all more familiar with technology and so you gotta be able to take advantage of that. So when you talk about barriers to entry and what you're saying from pay component, that's a piece. And then what that meant for us as far as repurposing positions specifically at our organization, I have not had any position consolidation since we implemented Paymerang, but that was never the goal. My goal was to recruit higher talented individuals that were looking to learn and grow and then grow their responsibilities as well. And that is absolutely what we've seen. Now I've got, and I call them business office specialists because they don't just do AP, especially whenever we've got technology like this in place and OCR and other things like that. So we've been able to take a role that needed to be very specialized in reading invoices, data entry, validation, those kind of steps, and now they can focus on just the 20% of things that probably have a little bit more complexity or attention to detail needed to them from a problem-solving perspective on the AP side. And then they're able to also support us now on some accounts receivable items and some other treasury processes and things like that for the organization. So it's allowed us, like I said, to create additional talent and additional responsibility within a role that traditionally and let's just say in whatever state you're in, let's say the base rate for AP is somewhere between $15 and $17 an hour, but they're only specialize in AP. Now I can bring someone in more entry level , let's say at $20 an hour, but I can cross train them on multiple things and now I'm getting more out of them for the incremental cost of what it is for the payment processing piece that we're paying for Paymerang.
John Zaudtke:Yeah, and we've seen that across not only senior living but also multiple different industries that we work in where to that point,Scott. We've had folks hired as an AP person able to implement Paymerang, free up some time. Now they're junior accountants, now they're working in development, now they're working in other aspects of the business. With the labor market the way it is, it's really hard to find people and so being able to train and bring up your own people I think is just a huge, huge element of this automation that we're talking about.
Scott Martinez:Absolutely.
Patrick Leonard:So, speaking of kind of efficiencies that this is creating, I love the real life use cases and just already kind of painting a picture of the ROI of implementing a solution like this for multiple different angles from what you all were just discussing. But John , can you tell me a little bit about integration? That's such a huge thing in the world of technology today and there's so many different specialized tools out there that are doing different things in different areas of the business. I imagine this is another one where some form of integration between different systems would be crucial. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?
John Zaudtke:Yeah, absolutely. So two separate sides of the house here, the front end with the invoice automation piece, you need to have some sort of integration, whether that is through a file upload into the ERP, whether that is an API connection where you're able to feed data back and forth is super important, Business Central, that we're talking about here, we have a direct integration. We're in their Microsoft Apps store. It looks like you're in Business Central when you're in reality in our simply AP product. So there are tighter integrations there on the front side on the backside with payments, we've worked with well over 150 different ERPs . So your common ones that you see, Scott talked about Great Plains, Business Central, MatrixCare is a big one in the senior living space PointClickCare. We've worked with all those and really the nice thing on the payment side is it's a simple file export, right? So, there doesn't have to be constant communication. It's at the end of the week you say, okay, here's who I have to pay. Let me kick out a quick Excel file that gets loaded into the Paymerang site. Mark everything is paid, posted to the general ledger, they're done. They don't have to do the reconciliation, they don't have to do the Positive Pay, Positive Pay exceptions. They're not sending a separate file out for Nacha and ACH. It's one single file, which makes it very, very simple. Almost every ERP, we have not found one that we can't work with, but almost every ERP can kick out a checks to be issued type file which gives us the information we need to be able to go make those payments.
Patrick Leonard:Got it. Thank you! That's super helpful. And so when I think about any type of implementation of a new system or a new process, whether it be technology related or not, although most of these days are, there's always some type of struggle and preparation that you need to kind of rally the troops to get behind a change such as something like this. I imagine going from paper to automating these things. Scott, I'm always curious and it sounds like this is a super easy one. Of course, I think I heard two, I don't know if it was two weeks or two months, you're up and running. Either way, it was super impressive, but Scott, can you talk a little bit, I'm always curious what it feels like on the operator side when you're going through this particularly someone who's leading the team like this, are there any lessons you learned from going through this process or anything that you would want another community who's considering making a leap like this to know in advance before they dive into this?
Scott Martinez:Yeah, I would say it's about communication, communication, communication. So we were in a unique position because we were going through a lot of transition here at Fowler right when I came in. So, things needed to change and the organization had more of an appetite for it because we were just coming out of the quick rapid response periods that were COVID-19 and all the changes that had to happen there. But we still have people that have been here for over 10 years, you know, long-term employees that are very used to certain processes, and so being able to communicate with them the changes that are coming and how that's gonna look requires a lot of communication and it requires a lot of repeat communication and you know, a little bit of handholding and a little bit of getting everyone comfortable. We, in particular, are only using Paymerang's payment automation piece of their product right now, but we do have another OCR. But to get us to this place, I mean from the moment I got here, as I mentioned, I don't like paper because I can't track where paper's moved from one place to another. I started putting us on various forms even within Great Plains of different AP routing processes. So, we built something in SharePoint at one point in time, we were doing something just through email at one point in time, all trying to move away from the paper piece of it. So, those incremental steps in getting to the place of being able to bring on a Paymerang were what helped the organization accept it and absorb it a little bit quicker because we'd already been taking, you know, small steps along the way to get there. So what I would say is if you're an organization that's doing everything via paper today, you're not gonna implement Paymerang in two months. Just because they can do it doesn't mean your organization's ready to take it on and accept it. So I give them that credit because we were ready but we were ready because we took baby steps along the way for the first year plus that I was here to get us in the position to be able to move quickly with a product like Paymerang.
Patrick Leonard:John, anything to add to that?
John Zaudtke:Yeah, I think Scott brings up a lot of great points when we talk to a lot of communities it is very paper-based and heavy and what I always tell folks is like Scott said, take baby steps, put payments in first. Scott will tell you now I think implementation, depending on your ERPs , anywhere between five days to 30 days. It's super, super simple and put that in first. Get rid of that tedious work that doesn't affect a lot of the community, really just can affect that AP person to start but really make an impact there on your vendors. Start seeing that time savings, that efficiency, that security. And then looking at invoice automation, that's the next step there. I always recommend to folks, even if you're not going to Scott's point, if you're not going to a full invoice automation solution, set up an inbox, an invoices@community.com URL where those vendors can start and get used to sending those invoices to that inbox as you take that next step into invoice automation that will automatically feed into that IA product that you use. And again, it's a baby step but it makes a huge difference as you're rolling out these products trying to get everything in one central place.
Patrick Leonard:Yeah, that's a good point. I think that's a good lesson for anybody who's diving into any new type of process change or technology implementation is you have to take baby steps, you have to properly communicate, set the team up for success and no, you can't do everything at once. So I think that's really good practical advice from both ends there . And you know two--
Scott Martinez:Patrick, what I would add too on, right? The communication piece is, I talked on the teammate side, but when you're in the senior living space and the not-for-profit senior living space of smaller organizations, it really is also on the vendor side. Yeah , so I think that the Paymerang team validate this for me in looking at our account and our vendors, just like every organization, we've got our share of your national vendors that everyone knows that are probably already on ACH or credit card with another client, and so it's an easy conversion but then we've got large portion of our vendors that are smaller, mom and pop may not be as familiar with that and are a lot more used to coming in and talking to your AP team and having checks handed to them versus things coming in the mail or logging in and setting up their ACH and things like that. So, it's a communication and learning process on that side as well. And I put as much effort into it as we could have. I didn't communicate enough to those vendors whenever we made that transition, I felt confident in our bigger vendors but I just didn't realize how much of an impact it would be on our smaller vendors, how much additional communication and handholding we need to provide. That's another key point I would add there in the communication and bringing people along.
John Zaudtke:Yeah, absolutely, and I think that speed to solution as we talked about, that's one thing here Paymerang, we want to make sure, so Scott, you probably remember this, we gave you inserts to put into your checks while we were going through implementation to announce that that's great for the smaller companies. I tell my team all the time, I'm gonna tell you something two, three times before you finally absorb it. <laugh> So, continually to talk to those vendors, making sure that they're aware more and more companies are moving to this so they're becoming more comfortable with it. But that communication piece, both from the community as well as Paymerang or whatever automation tool that you are using is super important. Needs to be a phone call, it needs to be a conversation and make sure everyone knows what's going on. Especially in the world of fraud today. Vendors have their fraud flags up just as much as we do, just as much as Scott and his team and really anybody at a community has because it really is scary out there when it comes to fraud.
Patrick Leonard:Yeah, you bring up an interesting topic there, John , cybersecurity fraud. It's such a huge topic right now and nobody is safe from it and I think senior living is starting to really feel the impact, what some people might have thought was a protected industry in a sense from this, and we work with folks all the time and talk to folks all the time, I should say at conferences who have have been victims of this. So can you talk to me a little bit about what steps Paymerang is taking play their part in securing communities data?
John Zaudtke:Yeah, obviously everything that we do is MFA, multifactor authentication login . So it's username , password, it's a six digit code that goes on top of it. But even on top of that, the tools that we use internally, ACH debit block, Positive Pay payee, Positive Pay, which kind of the next level there, you'd be surprised how many communities and companies we talk to that don't use Positive Pay today. And that's always my number one recommendation, whether you use this or not, put Positive Pay. You know, in the world of ransomware we very much discourage folks from storing banking information in their ERP. Unfortunately, I've seen this year alone, three different major ERPs get hit with ransomware, it's out there, it's gonna happen. So don't have any of that information in there. And then as we've built in to our platform to help protect our clients in their money, different fraud flags. If we paid you one bank account numerous times and all of a sudden you change, that's gonna pop a fraud flag, we're gonna call that vendor, "Hey, did you really mean to change this? Is this really you?" Very strict verification process to make sure we're talking to the right people . I will give this tidbit, communities are always doing construction on campus . Construction is the number one targeted fraud rate. There are lists on the dark web of every construction project going on in America, how much when it's gonna be completed, who the subs are, and the fraudsters are leveraging that tremendously because those are big dollar items. So when it comes to construction and working with construction vendors, make sure that you are double, triple, quadruple, checking everything before you make those payments.
Patrick Leonard:Yeah, thanks for that! That's a good segway into cybersecurity because it is a huge consideration right now and I think it's important in what you all are doing and but we all do too to help make sure our clients are safe. So thanks for that. We've talked on a lot of good topics today, but I'm going to kind of start to wrap this up, but before we do, I'm just curious to know, automation has come such a long way, particularly in senior living. I've been in the industry for a long time and the movement in the last five years itself has been absolutely extraordinary. So we've come such a long way. But I'm curious to know, John , from Paymerang's perspective and your perspective, where's this world of finance automation heading next? Is there anything exciting to be on the lookout, on the horizon, or to be preparing for?
John Zaudtke:Yeah, from a Paymerang perspective, today, we are very much heavy on the backend, getting the invoices routed, coded , approved , getting the payments out as we move forward, since we're more on the community side. I think a lot of organizations start looking at the vendor side as well and being that central hub where vendors and buyers can be talking together. You know, how can we get the funds from Fowler, for example, to McKesson quicker, faster, more secure in a way that it's easy for Fowler but it's also easy for McKesson . So receivables, automation , as technology used to grow is gonna be a huge aspect for us and a lot of organizations out there.
Patrick Leonard:Awesome, thanks for that! And Scott or John, before we wrap today, are there any other final thoughts or words you want to leave our listeners with?
Scott Martinez:No , yeah, I think we've covered quite a bit. Just appreciate the partnership that Paymerang's offering and the service and support that we get as well. I think just on the payment side, being able to reduce our time processing a payment batch by over 80% is quite a bit of time saved on a weekly basis. So, for any listeners out there that are on the fence and not sure if it's worth it, it is a hundred percent worth it to you, to your team and your organization to be able to partner with Paymerang or an organization like them .
John Zaudtke:Yeah, I just want to thank you Scott and Fowler for being such great clients. Obviously, Patrick and the Parasol team for having us here this afternoon. You know, automation has come a long way , it's going to continue to grow and it's going to continue to be a hot topic. You know, as Scott mentioned for all communities, we're here, we're happy to chat through and see if it makes sense for your community and Paymerang or you know, just give you some ideas, suggestions as we go along. So we appreciate the opportunity. Thank you!
Patrick Leonard:Awesome, and the thanks is all on this side of the table. I appreciate you both being here! I think this was an awesome discussion. There's so much more to the story obviously. So, hopefully folks can connect with both of you separately to learn more about your experience with finance automation and Paymerang and Juliette Fowler. So, thanks again for being here guys and taking the time to educate our listeners on this topic.
John Zaudtke:Fantastic, thank you. Yep. Thanks for having us!
Patrick Leonard:Absolutely, and listeners, thanks for tuning into another great episode of Raising Tech! If you have any feedback, a topic idea or want to be on the episode yourself. Please feel free to reach out on our website at www.ParasolAlliance.com. Have a good one!