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M. Shapiro Real Estate manages hundreds of multifamily and apartment communities across the country, and with that scale comes the pressure every real estate accounting team knows too well: nonstop invoices and endless coordination across onsite teams, remote approvers, and suppliers expecting on-time payments. When AP Specialist Sean Brenneman joined the company, he saw an opportunity to bring order to the chaos and help the team work with more control, consistency, and visibility.
Before fully implementing AvidXchange, M. Shapiro’s accounts payable (AP) process simply wasn’t built for the pace and volume of its growing portfolio. As a result, disorganized invoice intake, manual check processing, and inconsistent workflows overwhelmed the team. Their biggest pain point was late utility payments and associated fees.
“Specifically, the portfolio I took over had utilities being paid late at such a constant rate, we had GL codes for late payment fees,” Brenneman said.
To address this ongoing issue, M. Shapiro was forced to hire outside consultants to help sort through invoices and stay on top of payments.
As Brenneman explained, invoices came from everywhere: paper invoices dropped off onsite, emails forwarded from property managers, and email inboxes that AP had to comb through daily.
“We don’t want to have to look through 500 emails to figure out who’s getting paid,” Brenneman said.
Plus, they were “cutting way too many in-house checks,” Brenneman said. With more than 250 properties but only two people authorized to sign checks, each payment created a bottleneck. Brenneman had to send 15 checks a week via FedEx, which was costly. And because each portfolio operated slightly differently, there was no predictable workflow—only workarounds.
Brenneman led the charge at M. Shapiro and implemented a major optimization of its accounts payable process. He focused on a clear goal: make the entire workflow faster, more accurate, and easier for the team to manage. He automated steps that used to be manual and time-consuming and brought information from different platforms into one unified system within AvidXchange. Brenneman helped create cleaner, more consistent approval paths so invoices could move through the process without delays or confusion. Utility payments were a perfect example. As Brenneman put it, “We don’t need the CEO approving every utility, but we do need the CEO approving certain invoices”—which meant redesigning routing rules to match real-world priorities.
“Better workflows, better processing,” he said. Those changes helped the team quickly move routine payments through while keeping the right eyes on critical invoices.
Tools like automated invoice capture and in-software comments also became central to the way AP collaborates, helping teams resolve questions without long email chains or meetings.
Everything became much smoother and more streamlined within a single, secure platform, he said, further simplified by AvidXchange’s integration with their ERP, Rent Manager.
“It’s pretty easy,” said Brenneman. “We go into AvidXchange, code all the invoices we want, click a couple buttons, and it will send the invoices over to Rent Manager. Once it’s all set up, the week to week, day to day of sending through the payments is well done.”
This optimization set the foundation for the results that followed.
The biggest surprise, in Brenneman’s opinion, was how much time the team got back. M. Shapiro now saves up to 20 hours per week per team member, thanks to automated routing, standardized approvals, and far fewer manual checks. Reporting that once required two full business days now takes under one hour. That means the team is able to redirect time toward higher-value activities, such as strategic analysis, customer engagement, and faster, more transparent communications with suppliers to help strengthen those crucial relationships.
They also experienced a major cost savings: an estimated $75,000 annually through reduced labor hours, fewer errors, and lower operational costs.
The cost savings in FedEx spending alone was dramatic, from overnighting 15 envelopes a week to just two. And late utility fees dropped dramatically once bills stopped getting stuck in inboxes. AvidXchange’s associated invoice feature also prevented duplicate payments that previously cost time and money to clean up.
The panic of daily check cutting is gone, with 95% of payments now flowing through AvidXchange. And with automation doing the heavy lifting, team members can focus on higher-value work. Brenneman now oversees Positive Pay for more than 300 bank accounts, a responsibility that would have been impossible if he were still handwriting checks and mailing payments every day.
“When you’re not rushing out checks every second of the day, everything gets calmer in the office. And having just one system, you can keep an eye on that one system and say, ‘OK, I’m caught up.’”
