In this week’s Whiteboard Wednesday, Brian Thayer, Director of Sales for AvidXchange, covers MRI Vendor Pay. Brian covers how MRI Vendor pay enables automated payment without leaving their accounting system. MRI Vendor pay enables the user to select invoices for payment, approve and facilitate payment – all within MRI.
Video Transcription
Brian Thayer: Hi, folks. My name is Brian Thayer. I am the Director of Sales at AvidXchange. I’m here today at MRI helping present a Whiteboard Wednesday. Today’s topic is all about MRI Vendor Pay, and the workflow your customers experience. The great news with the MRI Vendor Pay is it actually provides a customer experience that’s very unique in an automated payment world. A lot of times, people have to leave the accounting system, log in to a bank, or log into another piece of software. With MRI Vendor Pay, you get to select your invoices for payment right within your MRI system. Nothing changes from what you’re doing today.
When you select the invoices for payment, they will simply get pushed over to a payment approval area, where your signing authority has the ability to bulk approve, batch approve, or individually approve the payments they’d like to issue.
Once those payments have been approved by your signing authority, what happens is that payment file is automatically sent out of MRI directly into what we call the MRI Vendor Pay powered by AvidXchange. The interesting thing here is you have the option to select this as the method of payment. You also have the ability to print a check in-house should you need to or issue another form of payment. This is just an available option now, but the power is that it sits right inside your MRI system.
Once you’re ready to actually execute those payments, all that has to occur is a simple transfer of funds from your client’s account to a clearing account on the AvidXchange side. This is the actual payment facilitation, and again nothing occurs here until you’re signing authorities actually approve those payments.
At this point, AvidXchange now has the available funds to issue to the vendor, and what happens is something we call the AvidXchange payment network. Today, we’ve built this network that is extensive. It’s over 400,000 vendors and suppliers in the United States. Essentially, what we’ve done is we’ve figured out how they’d like to get paid. We have a lot of different options from e-payments to checks, and depending on who that vendor is, we’re able to send out the correct form of payment that that vendor requests. Should they want to check, it’s as simple as getting the remit address, and we would actually be the ones to now print, sign, stuff and mail those checks on behalf of you.
If it’s an e-payment a vendor wants, we have a few options there as well. We have something called an enhanced ACH, which provides a nice level of remittance detail. There’s another new form of payment called virtual cards. This is very similar to a credit card, but it’s an electronic form. It’s very secure. It’s the fastest form of payment available, and it comes with the most remittance detail for the AR team to process.
The great news here is have this figured all this out, and you as a client, your experience is going to be smooth because we’re going to roll all of your vendors as well. So before you ever start using the system, every single one of your vendors is already going to be in this network. We’re already going to know how to pay them. The correct form of payment will go out again either as e-payment or check. Then that information also comes back into MRI. The payment status is now available within MRI at any point in time, in real-time. You’re going to be able to see what form of payment was issued, a check or an e-payment. You’re going to be able to see where it is in the payment cycle; if it’s in transit, when it clears, and then all the written remittance information is also going to come back to you guys for processing.
This actually finishes a loop here back into MRI. So you start at MRI, it ends in MRI. You as a client, all you have to do now is simply select what invoices you want to pay, from what account, and for how much. AvidXchange and MRI are going to do the rest of the work, creating that detailed payment file, passing it through an online approval, facilitating it to the vendor in the correct form, and then again providing all that status and updates back to you.
One of the really important piece here with the vendor network is that AvidXchange and MRI can handle a lot of these vendor inquiries now. Instead of you getting calls and requests from your vendors; one, the vendor can just look up and see where their payment is, or two, they can call us and get an inquiry that way.
This is the actual customer experience along here. The vendor experience stays right in this area. Again, as I mentioned, all that stays in MRI, it’s a very unique system that your clients don’t have to exit the accounting system, the place they live and breathe.
That’s pretty much it. Hopefully, this was educational on today’s Whiteboard Wednesday. Thanks again.
