Enhance Your Payment Processing with Payment Assistant™

Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT® Payment Assistant can transform your accounts payable by processing payments more quickly than traditional methods, improving cash flow and reducing manual tasks and associated errors. It eliminates paper checks and utilizes robust encryption and authentication measures to safeguard payment data. But don’t take our word for it. We recently had the opportunity to talk with Seth Hurd, Financial Controller and Director of Information Systems at Berwick Academy (Berwick, ME), about his adoption of Payment Assistant.

Tell us a little bit about your experience with signing up for Payment Assistant and getting comfortable with Payment Assistant as you changed your payment processes.



Seth: Absolutely! It was a relatively simple onboarding process. Once I logged into Blackbaud, I had some in-product announcements on the payable side to click in and sign up. It was a couple of steps, add some banking information, and hit submit! Then, in 3-4 business days, we were live and ready to go.



Since you have adopted Payment Assistant, how has it impacted your productivity at your organization?



Seth: There have been significant time savings and that has been in three areas.



The first is preparing for payments. Prior to utilizing Payment Assistant, we were using a third-party vendor for payments. There was a lot of creation of exports and reporting to import into the third-party system and with Payment Assistant that tedious work went away.



The second is time savings with the actual payments. You go through the payment process, you create your payment runs, and you hit submit. Your approver approves it and then you are done. Whereas when we did it with the third-party vendor, you are either doing imports, approving it in a third-party platform, or you are cutting checks. With Payment Assistant that all goes away.



Then, the third place where there’s time savings is research for your account payables team. They can now get information about payments, payments status, within the platform without having to log in elsewhere to do research.



Have you received any feedback from your vendors about the use of Payment Assistant or any of the specific payment types?



Seth: I would say no news is good news. The most contact we had from a vendor has been with the onboarding process.



I would recommend that you reach out to your vendors in advance of onboarding and go over the process with them so there are no surprises. Once our vendors were set up, there wasn’t any pushback or feedback. It seemed to be smooth, with an occasional refund or overpayment but that happens in any platform.



Being a K-12 school, did you need to make any changes to your process to accommodate students or parents?



Seth: There are two areas that have shifted in the transition to Payment Assistant. First, we are doing more digital payments than we did in the past. For example, if we needed to reimburse a parent, whether they bought supplies for an event or have a credit on the account, we would have asked the office to cut a check. But now with Payment Assistant, we pay them digitally. We actually have an uptick in digital payments compared to what we did with our old third-party vendor.



Second, and not really related to parents and students, is we are no longer working with a third-party vendor for payments. With the third-party vendor, we had a holding account or sweep account that processed the general ledger. And now with Payment Assistant in-house, we actually didn’t need to use a clearing account. So that muddy water is gone.



Has the process for bank reconciliation changed for you at all?



Seth: Yes, and you know I would recommend folks that are considering it, leveraging the bank feeds with the bank reconciliation. It really streamlined the process for me. Although we’ve been a Financial Edge customer for probably 25-30 years, I had never set up bank feeds. For Payment Assistant, I decided to set it up. Now the system is aware of Payment Assistant, and you can leverage that in your bank reconciliation.



Would you recommend Payment Assistant to other organizations? Why or why not?



Seth: I absolutely would. It’s the thing you didn’t know you needed, and I would absolutely recommend it for a few reasons. First, the time savings! Our payables folks have cut processing times in half. From a variety of outlets, like the preparation, from the follow-up and research. Second, having it under one roof and in the platform makes all the information available in a couple clicks. You can see the pay method and the status of the payment. So again, time saving and just all that information being a couple of clicks away.



I would also say to folks who are thinking about dipping their toes in the water, when we started this, we did not end our relationship with the third-party vendor. We actually ran Payment Assistant and the third-party concurrently. We were still using the third-party vendor while testing out Payment Assistant, which was successful. I would say in 60 days, we made the decision to drop our previous vendor and move all our payments to Payment Assistant.



Any final points to add?



Seth: Yes, I think there’s a couple of things. I would offer some tips for folks who are considering it. Contact your vendors up front and let them know about the process. Scrub your data in advance, which I think we all do. But, yes, it was a pretty seamless transition, and I think folks should give it a consideration.



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