When you think about paying suppliers, it’s more than just cutting a check. Suppliers are the ones maintaining your properties, responding to issues, and showing up month after month to keep your communities running. Paying them accurately and on time keeps those relationships strong, and that leads to happy residents and board members.
But as portfolios grow, managing payments in-house becomes more difficult. That’s when community association management companies begin to consider payment automation.
In this blog, you’ll learn:
- Managing payments in-house can help you feel in control, but it often requires multiple full-time staff as your portfolio grows
- Answering supplier payment questions can take hours out of your AP team’s week
- Check runs and manual payment processes become harder to sustain at scale
- What to watch for with supplier onboarding, implementation time, and payment fees when evaluating automation providers
- How to decide if payment automation makes sense for your community association management company
What Does It Mean to Manage Supplier Payments In-house?
Managing supplier payments in-house means you’re cutting checks yourself. Your team owns every step of the payment process, from the moment an invoice comes in to the moment your supplier gets paid.
It’s a multi-step process that looks something like this:
- Your AP manager opens a stack of envelopes or inbox notifications containing invoices across properties from suppliers like landscapers, HVAC technicians, pool maintenance companies, and electricians
- Your team codes each invoice to the correct association, property, and budget line item
- Your property managers and sometimes board members review and approve those invoices, often across multiple systems, emails, or approval chains
- Your AP team batches invoices into weekly or biweekly payment runs
- Your team prints checks and stuffs envelopes or logs into a bank portal to initiate ACH payments
- Meanwhile, your suppliers call your office asking, “Has my payment been approved?” or “When should I expect it?” and your team is responsible for tracking down the answer
Pros Of Managing Supplier Payments In-house
Managing supplier payments in-house can work well for smaller portfolios. If you’re managing a limited number of associations, your team may be able to handle payments without needing additional tools or support. Here are the pros of managing payments in-house:
You have direct control over every payment. Your team can decide exactly when payments go out, intervene when something looks off, and handle exceptions immediately. For some teams, that level of involvement is important (but keep in mind, similar approval controls can often be built into automated payment workflows).
You manage supplier relationships directly. In community association management, supplier relationships are personal. Your landscaper might service the same property every month. Your maintenance vendor might be on-site weekly. When those suppliers have questions, your team can respond directly without relying on a third party.
Everything stays within your existing processes. There’s no new system to implement, no training required, and no disruption to how your AP team currently works.
Cons Of Managing Supplier Payments In-house
The challenge is that the manual labor starts to break down as you scale your community association management portfolio. What works at 20 associations doesn’t always work at 100.
You need multiple full-time employees to keep payments moving. As payment volume grows, so does the workload. Processing invoices, managing approvals, running payment cycles, and handling supplier questions can easily require several full-time staff members. And many community association management companies are running lean and trying not to burn out their staff.
Answering vendor questions takes hours out of your team’s week. When a supplier calls asking, “Where’s my payment?” your team often has to:
- Check the accounting system
- Confirm approval status
- Look up the payment run
- Verify whether the check was mailed or the ACH was initiated
This can take 10–15 minutes per inquiry. And if you’re dropping a check in the mail, you likely don’t have tracking status anyway.
Check fraud risk is real. According to the 2025 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 79% of organizations reported attempted or actual payments fraud activity in 2024. Checks are the most frequently targeted payment method. If a check is stolen and fraudulently deposited, your company is responsible for recovering those funds. In the meantime, the association is missing money, and boards start asking questions about how funds are being handled.
“Each and every day, four people sat around a conference room table opening invoices that were sent through the mail. They manually entered data from each invoice into our accounting system and then sent a copy to our corporate office for the accounting team to issue payments.”
What Is Payment Automation?
With payment automation, you outsource the manual work of paying your suppliers to a payments automation provider, such as AvidXchange.
Your AP team becomes more efficient:
- Your AP manager reviews and approves invoices within the software
- Your team initiates payments in bulk, instead of printing checks or managing ACH batches in a bank portal
- Your AP staff and your suppliers can monitor payment status within a centralized dashboard
…and that’s it. No extra steps.
Pros of Payment Automation
Supplier satisfaction increases. With a provider like AvidXchange, suppliers can log into a portal to check payment status, remittance details, and expected delivery timing. They get paid the way they want, whether it’s check, virtual credit card, or ACH.
Many of your suppliers now expect faster, more transparent payment options, not just a check in the mail. And when payments become more predictable, you’ll build stronger supplier relationships—especially with recurring services like landscaping or maintenance.
No more check runs. With payment automation, your team no longer spends time printing, signing, and mailing checks. Instead, payments are executed in bulk, and your team can focus on reviewing approvals or handling exceptions. If your suppliers prefer checks over digital payments, then payment automation providers like AvidXchange will execute those on your behalf.
Your operation can scale without adding headcount. As your portfolio grows, your AP team doesn’t have to grow at the same rate. For example, after integrating AvidXchange with their accounting system, our customer Agynbyte was able to process 62.5% more invoices and payments without adding staff to their AP team.
"After a period of intense growth, we contribute a large amount of the success to the way AvidXchange and Caliber work together to get payments out quickly while changing very little about how the entire company uses Caliber. AvidXchange gives our accountants all the information integrated into Caliber to do monthly financials and makes it effortless for association managers to find information."
Cons of Payment Automation
Payment modernization isn’t for everyone, and if you have a small portfolio of communities, the benefits might not outweigh the challenges. Here are some things to consider:
Suppliers need to be onboarded to the new platform. In community association management, you’ve likely built long-standing relationships with suppliers, and you may feel hesitant asking them to change how they receive payments. That’s why it’s important to work with a partner that actively manages vendor onboarding and already has an established supplier network.
For example, AvidXchange’s established network of 1.5 million suppliers means you probably already have a handful of suppliers enrolled in our platform.
Implementation requires time and internal alignment. Even with faster implementations (AvidXchange is as quick as 45 days), your team will need to learn a new system and adjust workflows. That requires buy-in from your accounting team and clear communication about how processes will change.
Some teams worry about losing control. If your current process involves manually reviewing or signing every check, moving to automation can feel like a loss of oversight. Look for a provider that allows you to set approval rules, like requiring additional review for payments over a certain threshold. For example, with AvidXchange, you could set up workflows to personally review every payment over $10,000 or have certain invoices to go through a particular manager.
Digital payments come with a cost. ACH and card payments often come with a small fee per transaction. Depending on the provider, there may be options to offset or manage those costs for the supplier, such as AvidXchange’s Sponsored ePayment. Or vendors may choose to continue receiving checks instead.
| Process | Managing Payments In-House | Using Payment Automation |
|---|---|---|
| How suppliers check payment status | Suppliers call or email your team, and your AP staff tracks down the answer manually (can take 10-15 minutes per inquiry) | Suppliers log into a portal to see real-time payment status, remittance details, and timing |
| Payment execution | AP team prints checks, stuffs envelopes, or initiates ACH through bank portals | Payments are executed in bulk through one platform (no more check runs) |
| Supplier payment preferences | Your team tracks who wants checks vs ACH and updates records manually | The platform’s support team manages supplier payment preferences for you |
| Check runs | Weekly or biweekly check runs can take several hours each cycle | No check printing or mailing. And with AvidXchange, if suppliers choose to be paid by checks, then AvidXchange will execute those for you |
| Scaling your portfolio | More communities = more payments = more staff needed to keep up | Payment volume increases without requiring proportional headcount growth |
| Implementation effort | No change. Your current process continues | Requires setup, training, and changes to your current process |
| Supplier onboarding | No change to how suppliers are paid | Suppliers may need to enroll in new payment methods or systems. Look for providers who already have a strong supplier network and supplier enrollment team, like AvidXchange |
Does Payment Automation Make Sense for Your Community Association Management Company?
If your community portfolio is small and your team doesn’t spend too much time on supplier management, then payments automation might not make sense right now.
But if any of the following are true:
✅ Your portfolio is growing or already complex, but you don’t want to add additional staff
✅ Your AP team is spending hours each week on “What’s the payment status?” inquiries and manual processing
✅ Supplier satisfaction is becoming harder to manage
✅ You want to reduce your risk of check fraud
… then it may be time to consider payment automation.
Next Steps: Get Ready for Trade Show Season
Now that you understand the difference between managing supplier payments in-house and using payment automation, the next step is to compare payment automation providers. And trade show season is a great opportunity to compare providers side by side.
Next, read “How to Approach Trade Show Season with a Modernization Plan” so you can learn how to ask the right questions at a trade show and identify providers who deserve deeper evaluation.
Important Notice: This content is intended solely as a research tool for informational purposes and not as investment advice or recommendations for any particular action or investment and should not be relied upon, in whole or in part, as the basis for decision making or investment purposes. Any estimates, projections, and information contained herein have been obtained from public sources or are based upon estimates and projections and involve numerous and significant subjective determinations, and there is no assurance that such estimates and projections will be realized. This content does not in any way reflect expectations for (or actual) AvidXchange operational or financial performance