Founded in 1985, Prestige Care, Inc. continues the legacy of Sarah Delamarter, a pioneer in Oregon’s long-term care industry. Sarah first began using her nursing skills to care for seniors in her home back in 1946 as a means to support her family. Her grandsons, Harold and Dr. Rick Delamarter and their partner Greg Vislocky, now own and operate 72 Prestige Care and Prestige Senior Living communities in eight Western states. Their mission is still to create a place that seniors can call home while receiving whatever level of living assistance they may need.
Prestige Care communities provide nursing and rehabilitation services in addition to Alzheimer’s and dementia care. Prestige Senior Living communities offer both independent retirement and assisted living options. A central support office in Vancouver, Washington manages the finances for all 72 locations, using Intacct, a leading cloud based ERP, as their healthcare financial management and accounting system.
Situation
The myriad of financial transactions that are needed to operate the Prestige residential communities pass through the domain of the company controller, Jodi Black. A great many of them result in checks being printed, either directly by Prestige or indirectly through their bank, Wells Fargo. “We outsource a lot of our check-writing to Wells Fargo. We send them a file and they print the checks for us. The Wipfli solution provides positive pay services both on these checks and, separately, on the checks we print ourselves,” Black says.
Many banks offer positive pay services as a way to prevent fraudulent checks and presenters. This is typically done by uploading a text or CSV file to the bank website. The banking system automatically compares the check numbers, payee, and dollar amounts on checks presented against the company’s uploaded file of checks issued. If they don’t match, the bank does not release the funds.
Formerly, Prestige used a manual process to create the issued-check file for Wells Fargo. Black says, “We would print a check register from Intacct and reformat it to Wells Fargo’s specifications for positive pay submissions. We saved that as a separate file and prepared it to be uploaded. There was room for human error in that process. In addition, we found we had an odd quirk. Whenever someone got a new computer, it would not create the issued-checks file correctly; the settings were computer-specific. Maintaining separate programming on different user stations was annoying and inefficient.”
Prestige wanted to replace its time-intensive manual process with an easy, automated solution to generate the weekly files to submit to Wells Fargo. They found this solution in PositivePay for Intacct, a companion product developed by Wipfli, a leading Intacct value-added reseller. By integrating seamlessly with the Intacct platform, PositivePay for Intacct enabled Prestige to configure the layout of the check register to meet Wells Fargo requirements and auto-generate weekly files.
Strategy
Wipfli implemented PositivePay for Intacct in November 2012. Black says, “We are very happy with the results. PositivePay for Intacct is easier and faster to use than our former process, and now we have a better record too. Wipfli’s solution picks up any voids of the checks that the bank prints for us. For us that is important because it makes the monthly reconciliation process easier and quicker as well. And personally, PositivePay for Intacct is a great relief for me because it saves me from having to maintain the computer-specific programming of our previous manual process.”
Prestige Care has seven to eight different users of PositivePay for Intacct at any time—five in Accounts Payable, plus two or three staff accountants who might use it at the end of the month for reconciliation. Asked how difficult it was to train them on Wipfli’s PositivePay for Intacct, Black simply laughs. “Very easy—maybe 5-10 minutes,” she says.
Key requirements included:
• The file output must match the exact requirements expected by Wells Fargo
• The process must be automated, repeatable, and include voided check information
• Multiple users must have security rights to run the process
• Historical files must be stored within the solution for reference
Key challenges included:
• The solution must distinguish between checks cut directly by Wells Fargo and those cut by Prestige Care, Inc.
• Positive Pay solution needed for multiple entities and multiple checking accounts
Benefits
Prestige Care now spends less time on manual work in order to compile Positive Pay file for Wells Fargo, saving time and costs. They have the ability to automatically generate a Positive Pay file in the format required by Wells Fargo, and can access a view of voided checks, facilitating bank reconciliations. They have eliminated the need for maintenance of computer-specific programming.
