Large Nonprofit’s Accounts Payable Process Becomes Faster, Simpler, and More Reliable Thanks to Yooz

Accessible Space, Inc. (ASI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing both accessible and affordable assisted/supportive and independent living opportunities for very low-income physically disabled people and seniors.  

The Challenge

Accessible Space, Inc. (ASI) began in 1978 as a master’s thesis between two students trying to solve the housing dilemma experienced by a disabled friend. They grew to now serve over 4,250 clients across 25 states for both housing and the medical needs: more developments and housing units than any other nonprofit organization. However, with approximately 500 employees (mostly in the 24-hour care area) and hundreds of properties, this same growth resulted in time-consuming and complicated manual-based accounting processes.

“It is a lot of properties.” stated Judy Lemke-Kline, ASI Director of Finance. “And because each individual one is a separate legal entity - which means a separate audit - we're required to do audits on over 100 different sites every year.” With over a hundred different bank accounts with separate checkbooks the sheer amount was overwhelming.

According to Lemke-Kline, further complicating the situation was that “all of our accounting staff are in this office but not all the approvers…and we had to get (to) them, and we were faxing, and it was a nightmare.” This meant that in addition to the entire process being manual often errors were discovered after payment was already completed.

A final pain point involved the organization’s existing software platform. Not only did any additional solution need to interface with the existing General Ledger system, but the existing system was also somewhat inflexible. 

Fortunately, years ago Lemke-Kline had started hearing discussions about AP automation and had already included adoption as part of the organization’s 3-year strategic plan. Selecting the right vendor as a partner was a long process and included demonstrations, cost analysis, attribute comparisons, etc. Lemke-Kline stated, “we had to find the right thing that would work, and cost was a factor because we’re a nonprofit.”

The Solution

The vendor that Lemke-Kline chose was Yooz. When asked what made Yooz stand out, Pamala Schmierer, Affiliate Accounts Payable for Accessible Space, stated that “money was a contributor of who we picked. And I just thought it was user friendly. The demonstration I got was wow, this makes sense. I think I could do this.” 

This user-friendly aspect was important. Schmierer, stated “going from a paper heavy manual process to a completely automated process is obviously scary. It’s a dramatic shift.” Without truly understanding how the new system would work the employees were hesitant to adopt something new.

ASI decided to phase themselves into the new system over a six-month period, trying it out to get used to it and determine the best ways to do the approval. During this time ASI saw their pain points addressed by the new Yooz platform including:

• The ability to retrieve information quickly and easily thanks to an electronic file record system. Much to Lemke-Kline‘s delight they’ve “gotten rid of 16 different file cabinets that we no longer have need for.”
• Employee time freed up to do more things that they should – and now can - be doing. One area of importance was how the information is automatically scanned into the system. “That has really been a lifesaver of finding things fast because we don’t have a lot of time to scan” stated Lemke-Kline.

The ability to scan information into the system even before it’s paid and the ability to look up information at any time proved to be the most liked automation feature of the Accessible Space staff. “I think that’s helped catch a lot of things” she stated, “There’s no question that it’s helping with accuracy”.