Daniel Miracola with Central Presbyterian Church shares how AvidXchange helped to automate their accounts payable process, allowing them to scale while reinvesting their savings back into the church.
Central Presbyterian Church is a historic congregation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, founded by pastor and abolitionist William Patton in 1821.
After experiencing a period of decline in the early 2000s, the church has grown its congregation into a culturally diverse body of more than 500 members. To keep up with the continued pace of growth, the church needed an accounts payable (AP) solution that could modernize its outdated processes and meet its growing demands.
The challenge: Finding an AP solution to scale alongside the church
As the church began to experience significant growth, they realized they needed an AP solution that could grow and adapt to support the church’s daily operations.
The church used Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT as their accounting system, but they knew they needed to add a more personalized AP solution that integrated seamlessly, removed inefficiencies and would ensure all payments were processed accurately and on time.
“We were looking for a solution that could easily sync with our current accounting system, Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, and be able to quickly get approval from the right people within the church,” said Miracola.
Customer Profile
Industry: Religious institution
Products used: AvidInvoice; AvidPay
Accounting system: Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT
Dan Miracola grew up in eastern Long Island, NY, and after graduating from Cornell University in 2006, he moved to New York City to pursue a career on Wall Street. After working in finance for nearly nine years, he joined Central Presbyterian Church in Fall 2013 serving as a deacon and volunteer in the children’s and youth ministry. In January 2015, Dan joined the church's staff as the Director of Finance and Operations and the Director of Youth Ministry.
The solution: Increasing efficiency and streamlining workflows
Central Presbyterian Church has seen multiple benefits since integrating Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT with AvidXchange’s cloud-based, invoice-to-pay solution in the summer of 2019. Now, the team can fully automate their accounts payable with automatic syncing of GL codes, vendor lists, and invoices and payments between AvidInvoice, AvidPay and Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT.
Before the church implemented Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, they would hand off the invoice to several people before the payment process was complete. This could extend the payment process several days, even weeks, creating tension with their supplier relationships.
“When the pandemic hit, we were so heavily reliant on paper and we knew we had to modernize our technology. The reason we chose AvidXchange was due to the need to automate our approvals and to move payment processing and check cutting out of our hands. Since adding AvidInvoice and AvidPay, we’ve noticed a huge difference in our team’s ability to work remotely and log in payments seamlessly.”
Now, the church has the structure needed to ensure all payments are made on time. It utilizes automation to minimize human error while decreasing the time and money spent on payment processing.
The result: Reinvesting savings back into the church
By integrating AvidXchange’s invoice-to-pay solution with Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, not only was the church able to increase efficiency and streamline AP processes, but they also gained better visibility into their expenses which allowed them to uncover savings.
These savings have been reinvested into the church’s programs and ministries. By receiving a more accurate representation of where their expenses stand at the end of the month, the church gained visibility into how they could reallocate expenses to better serve their community.
As the church continues to expand and reach more people in need, AvidXchange will help them to keep pace by increasing efficiencies, providing visibility and maintaining control.
