Name: Reduce Fraud and Eliminate Paper Checks with Payment Assistant
Uploaded: 2026-03-11T18:00:33.771Z
Duration: 32 min 12 s
Description: Reduce Fraud and Eliminate Paper Checks with Payment Assistant

Transcript for "Reduce Fraud and Eliminate Paper Checks with Payment Assistant": teammates on here as well, Tiffany Gatlin, Miranda Laplume, Lucina Meyer, and Rachel Kroyle. They'll be helping out some questions as well. But thank you again for taking time to explore this. It is our AP solution for payment processing, and our goal is with payment assistance to streamline and automate your vendor payments and just do it all directly within Financial Edge NXT. So again, there's no cost to this. It is completely free to use. It's just a part of your package, and there are a couple steps to get up and running with this. We'll show you how as well. We have made some exciting new improvements and updates recently such as the ability to connect multiple bank accounts, credit memos now being displayed on the vendor remittance, and the payment increase per payment run from 250 to 2,500 payments per payment run. But just a few housekeeping rules. Let me click my slide here. There we go. Webinar housekeeping. So it's gonna be broadcast through your computer speakers. So, hopefully, everybody is able to currently hear me. If you do encounter any audio or technical issues such as the slides freezing, usually just doing a quick refresh of the browser is the best way to get it working again. So if that doesn't work, you could try to resolve the issue by just, you know, logging out, logging in. That'll usually help it as well. But please click on the q and a on the top right to submit your questions that you have for for today's content. Check out our docs section as well for some great payment system resources. That'll include a data sheet, our FAQs, and the BBU Blackbaud University micro learnings. But you can also adjust the settings at any time using the cogwheel at the bottom of the event space. Finally, the one question we get asked most often, is there gonna be a recording of this? Yes. We're gonna get that out to you within about twenty four hours after the end of today's session. But with that, we will get started. We're gonna play a little video here for you, and then we will jump into our q and a section. Welcome to today's webinar. In this video, you'll discover how payment assistant can transform your AP process with faster, cost effective, and secure payments. We will then show you how to easily set it up in Financial Edge NXT. Imagine if your organization can manage every dollar it spends in one solution. How much time could you save? How much more impact could you deliver? With Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT, you now have access to a true fund accounting system with expense management, purchasing card capabilities, simplified bank reconciliations, and automated payments all in one solution. Introducing payment assistant, our advanced automated payment solution. It guarantees more efficient accounts payables and safeguards your financial data. Eliminating traditional paper based methods reduces errors and improves cash flow. An automated payables process and advanced fraud protection shouldn't just be for Fortune 500 companies. Now you and your mission can enjoy the benefits. Using industry and internal data, we found that AP processing could represent a significant portion of a finance professional's work week and that checks, in particular, are expensive to process for our customers. Complex processes, labor intensive tracking, and a lack of visibility are some of the complaints we've heard about payment processing. But the biggest concern for you and for us is fraud. So we developed a solution to address those issues. Payment assistant automates all of your vendor payments, giving you more time to focus on your mission. Vendors are paid quickly and on time using virtual cards, check printing, and ACH processing. I'll go over this in more detail later, but at the highest level, you select invoices to group into payment runs. When those payment runs are submitted, approvers are automatically notified by email and in product. And once approved, payments are delivered via virtual card, ACH, or a remotely printed check. Also, your vendors receive remittance and follow-up automatically. Introducing custom approval tiers. Every payment run requires at least one approver before funds are withdrawn to pay vendors. Your organization may need multiple approvers or different approvers based on payment amounts. With payment assistant, you can define up to five approval tiers for payments. These rules apply per payment, not per payment run. Setting up these approval tiers also includes configuring email and end product notifications. These customer approval tiers ensure timely approvals, they enhance security, and strengthen your organization's internal controls. This is why we believe payment assistant can transform your AP payments process. It saves you the time spent reaching out to vendors, cutting paper based checks, and performing other time consuming manual tasks. And since it is natively within Financial Edge NXT, reconciliation is seamless, and you gain real time visibility into these payments. But don't just take my word for it. Here's Seth Hurd from Burwick Academy. He says, we went all in with payment assistant. Just by doing that switch, I cut my workload in half. Because payment assistant's in product, I don't have to export anything. I don't have to run two sets of reports. I don't have to reconcile. The same goes for the approval process with the CFO. It says, are you in there looking at the balance sheet? He doesn't have to log in to another product. Everything is built right in, and not having all those additional steps saves a lot of time. It's been a huge time saver for them. There are a few steps to take before you begin processing payments. Now we'll talk through requesting and filling out an application with our payment processing partner, Repay. Once payment assistant is enabled in your instance of Financial Edge NXT, you can view this getting started page by clicking the payables drop down and choosing payment assistant. This is where you can sign the payment service agreement in order to begin processing payments with our partner, Repay. Clicking this link will take you to the introduction page that covers the information needed to complete your agreement. Include your corporate name, address, contact info, federal tax info, executive sponsor details, and bank account information for payment assistance. Note that verification of the bank account will be needed by providing a copy of a voided check or bank statement or account verification on bank letterhead. Use the next button to proceed through the agreement. Required fields are marked with a red asterisk, and you can save and close your agreement at any time. You can also use the tabs at the top to navigate between different pages of the agreement. The authorized signer tab will be the last one to complete before previewing the contract. You're done. You can preview the contract and click save and submit to complete the process. At that point, Repay begins its underwriting process, which can take three to five business days. Now I'll walk you through creating a payment run live. So here I am on the home screen of Financial Edge NXT. Before we get started creating a payment run, I wanna talk to you guys a bit about setting up roles and notifications in the settings. Roles are helpful for determining who is allowed to create payment run, who's allowed to approve a payment run, and you can do that by selecting control panel up at the top and then going to security. Here, you select security roles and you navigate to payment assistant roles. Here, you have the opportunity to create a new role or edit current roles. So let's create a new role. If you click this button and give the role a name, you're gonna input a description, choose any of these permissions, that you wanna give to that role. And once you select the permissions that you want, you just click save, and that role is created. Alright. Let's take a look at an example of a role that we have already set up. So this payment run creator, we can come in and view what this person has access to. So we can see that it has the access to view this role has the access to view and manage payment runs, but not to approve them. You can set up your roles in any way that you'd like, but a recommendation from us is to have three separate roles. The creators who prepare and submit payment runs, the one for approvers to review, approve, or delete payment runs, and then third, for an admin role who can set up payment assistant and complete the onboarding manager settings. Alright. Last item before we create a payment run-in configuration settings is setting up those approvers and approval tiers. So we've actually recently launched multi tiered payment approvals. This means that payments can now be approved at multiple levels based on different rules. This ensures larger transactions receive that necessary oversight while this Alright. To navigate to these settings, you're gonna go to the payables drop down and choose settings. Now we're gonna look at approval tiers first. In our system, we have a two tier approval approval process. So zero to 50,000 is tier one. Tier two is 50,000 above. Zero to 50,000, we have Haley, and she must approve anything underneath 50,000. Anything above 50,000 must go to Regina. You can also add multiple approvers to each tier. I can say, hey. Hallie and Blake must approve, or I can say Hallie or Blake must approve, and you can do that per tier. You can add more tiers depending on your organization's approval process, and then you can finish it up here, and you will see one more modal before finishing. Next, we'll want to edit any of our notification settings for our different approvers. So here, I'm gonna log it into myself, and I wanna say, hey. I want Blake to get both in product and email notifications or email or just in product. So great to be able to manage all those settings for when people need to approve their payment runs. Alright. Let's create a payment run. Now there are two different ways to create a payment run. Let's first start with treasury. So we go to our treasury. We go to our list of bank accounts. Then you're gonna navigate to the one associated with payment assistant. See that here, payment assistant enabled. Here, you can open up this menu here and process payments. This menu will show you, hey. There's this new option of paying by payment assistant, or you can also process with your legacy method of, you know, bank draft, computer check, EFT, etcetera. But once we process payments or click process payments here with payment assistant, it is going to pop up this screen to show you the list of invoices that you want to select and then to submit for approval. Alright. Before I walk through this, let me show you the other way. Alright. The other way that you can create a payment run is under the payables drop down and go to payment assistant. Here, we can see all the different payment runs that have been created. We can see the final approval date, the amount, where they're at in the status, amount paid, associated invoices, and the associated vendors. So let's go to this one that, has been created but has not been approved or submitted for approval yet. We can see, which bank accounts it's gonna be funded by. We can see, you know, when it was created. So we have the audit trail. We can come in and edit. So if we want to, add some invoices to this particular, payment run, we absolutely can. And then, we would submit it for approval. Now let's run back to creating a new payment run. Alright. Here you can see a list of all the unpaid invoices in your account. By selecting a number of them, you can see a total for the payment run that you're about to create, the number of invoices selected, and the number of payments. So since these three invoices are all under the same vendor, it's going to group them into one payment. Alright. Once you are ready to submit for approval, you can click that here, and it will say, hey. You submitted for approval down here. And since I am set up as a approver for anything under 50,000, I got the end product notification up here. I also got an email notification since I have that set up under my settings. This is what it'll look like when you need to approve a payment run. So we'll be able to see all the information that we need, about this payment run. We'll see, the amount. We'll see, what account it's being funded by, what remaining approvals, are needed, history. We'll be able to see, the associated invoices, with these. We can also if there's an attachment to it, we could view this attachment, and then, we're also able to, generate a prepayment report. Alright. Finally, once your payment run has gone through the necessary approval process, the funds are drawn out of your bank account and put on a twenty four hour hold before being distributed to vendors. Alright. That wraps up creating a payment run. Now it's time to talk a little bit about the vendor experience. Blackbaud works with Repay, a trusted payments technology platform to manage vendor enrollment for payment assistant on behalf of Blackbaud. Repay has dedicated payment specialists who work with vendors and manage ongoing payment data updates to ensure seamless payment experiences. Once a payment specialist receives a new vendor's information from a payment run, they begin the enrollment process by contacting that vendor to confirm their preferred payment method, whether that's virtual card, ACH, or check, and securely stores the information necessary to send that payment. Once the payment method is recorded, future payments will default to that method and no further contact is needed. The vendor is able to change the preferred method at any time by contacting REPAY. Remittances are sent automatically by email or included with the check. Now I'd like to end with a few frequently asked questions. First, how much does payment assistant cost? Payment assistant is included in the cost of your Financial Edge NXT subscription. Next, does payment assistant replace my entire invoice payment process? For some customers, payment assistant can replace your entire process immediately. For others, there may still be a small number of payments that need to be processed separately, such as wire transfers and international payments. What information is required to submit an invoice? To add an invoice to a payment run, it must include the vendor's address, phone number, invoice number, and a customer number. How long before payments are sent? Once a payment run is approved, the funds are pulled from your account and held for one business day. Payments seem to be approved before 5PM eastern, Monday through Friday, for the hold to occur on the following business day. After this hold, all payment methods are processed immediately to the vendors. Electronic payments such as virtual card or ACH are the quickest, while checks typically take seven to ten days to arrive by mail. When do payments go stale and what happens to them? Payment assistant waits seven business days to see if a balance still exists on virtual card payments. After this period, a payment specialist will assist the vendor confirming the outstanding item and, if needed, reissue it with a different payment method. If the invoice payment is invalid, the funds will be returned to the organization, voided, and resubmitted with the correct information, if applicable. Can I choose the preferred payment method for my vendors? We will always contact your vendor for the preferred payment method and will always offer virtual card, ACH, and check. What happens if the vendor doesn't respond? If we can't get the vendor's payment preference during the one business day hold, we will automatically send them a check. We will continue to contact the vendor on any future payments until we confirm their preferred payment method. We never hold back payments for lack of response. What happens if I wanna stop a payment? You can reach out to Blackbaud support if you want to stop a payment, and we will start the process for you. What is a virtual card? A virtual card or vCard is a 16 digit one time used card for the exact amount of the vendor payment being submitted, enhancing protection against fraud. Vendors are responsible for their standard credit card fees through their merchant bank when accepting credit card payments, which does not change with vCards. If a vendor states they will charge fees back to the business, they will not be enrolled in vCard, and they will be offered the other payment methods, ACH or checks. Does payment assistant work with Positive Pay? Yes. You'll be able to use Positive Pay to verify the payment runs lump sum withdrawn from your account. Repay will separately use Positive Pay to verify the individual payments sent to your vendors. Can I set up multiple bank accounts? Yes. Payment assistant now supports multiple bank accounts. This is a new addition to Payment Assistant. And with that, I wanna say thank you for your time and for your interest in Payment Assistant. We can't wait to help you simplify your AP payments process. Okay. I hope everybody enjoyed that video. Very informative for payment assistant, but we would also like to provide you with a personalized demo so you can book that through our poll. I'm about to drop that right now. Let me just get to that. We're gonna be releasing that. So if you wanna have a demo with myself or one of my teammates, we'd be more than happy to walk you through, you know, our personalized demo. And then we have a test system so we could show you how to submit and approve those payment runs as well. Really, really easy to do it, though, very intuitive system. So that poll should be open. So if you do want more information, we're more than happy to do it. It's really quick, by the way, too. You know, only about thirty, forty five minutes for these demos. We can show you how to get completely set up. But just a reminder, it is completely free for you to use. I think I might have mentioned it when we first started, but we now have a stop payment feature directly in payment assistance. So the old method was to call or contact our customer support through our chat. You can now accomplish that directly within payment assistance. Huge time saver for stopping payments. You can do it quickly. Your team can do it efficiently. But just constantly improving our solution for this. And Libby asked if we have a sample communication we should send to vendors to let them know that you're gonna be using Repay. Yeah. We do, Libby. So we actually have a vendor template. You know, if we provide you with a demo, we can get that to you unless you're already using payment assistance and just popped in to kinda do a refresh on it. But, yeah, we could get that sent over to you as well. So if you want us to send that over, you can just drop your email in the chat or the question here, and we could just send that out to you. And we have some questions in our chat as well. And, Debbie, you would like a one on one for this process. Wonderful. So just answer that poll, and then we'll have your information. And myself or one of my teammates will reach out, And we'll send over a calendar link. You could book some time for that. We'd be more than happy to connect with you and give you that one on one personalized demo. And Megan O'Hara, you said, what if you have vendors that are not signed up for payment assistance? So our partner, Repay, will get them enrolled, Megan. So if they're already signed up and enrolled with payment assistance through, you know, another organization, then they're already gonna be enrolled. So Repay will just pay them according to the method that they're enrolled as. If they're not, though, Repay will get them enrolled. It's very easy. We offer that virtual card, ACH payments. We also offer the EFT sharing. So if you do have ACH information on your vendor record for your vendors, it just makes it a lot easier to get them paid. Four individuals will be automatically enrolled if you get them paid right off the bat, but very simple process for this. It does not cost anything to send the paper checks, Megan, or the ACH or the virtual cards. Completely free to you. There's no cost for the vendors to accept the ACH either. So there's just no cost for postage, for the envelopes, you know, for the checks, nothing. So Beth, you asked, invoices need to be entered manually for payment, or is there a way to upload them? So there's no current invoice automation, Beth. So you're gonna have to enter those invoices, get them approved the same way that you always have. Just get them in, get them approved. And, you know, if you need to add a, like, scan them as a as a PDF or however you do it. But payment assistant is just the payment approval process. So we don't have anything for that initial invoice entry for it. And, Debbie, you said that you don't have a link to our poll. It should be it should be showing. If you click the polls, Debbie, at the top, if you get out of the chat and click polls, it'll it'll let you pick one of the selections and then submit it. So you just have to go to the top here, and then there should be there should be sections, chat, poll, docs, and then q and a. And if you just click that, let me know if you're still having trouble with it. And, Judith, you asked, does Repay have any fees outside of Financial Edge? No. Repay doesn't. The only the only fee involved in in any of this is for the virtual card to the vendor, and they're they're very well aware of that. That's from their bank, though. So that fee is taken out by their bank when they process the virtual cards through their merchant account that they have set up with the bank. It's a very low amount, but it's different for each bank. But, no, we don't take out any fees. Repay is not taking out any fees for that. Debbie, you found the poll. Wonderful. Glad you found that. And, Natalie, you asked, are the approvals in EMM? So I'm assuming you're saying expense management the same as in payment assistant or different. If you are referring to expense management, they are different. So the approvals for payment assistant, are their own approval tiers. They don't carry over from any other solution or part of financial edge. So you can set those up based on, you know, who was giving the web signature for your checks, but there's a lot of flexibility with it. So those tiers go by dollar amount as the video showed. You could change those at any time as well. So you go in and and change those. And, Judith, you asked, would we run reports prior to selection as we do now? So you would actually you could do a prepayment report. So there is reporting within payment assistance. So we could show you during the demo how to do that. You know, there's a couple ways to report it. But we have a prepayment report before you do the run. So that'll show, you know, the the vendors and your account coding, the accounts that you're paying to. So it'll list that out. You can attach it, the prepayment report, which is a cash disbursement journal. You can attach it to the payment run. You can also do reporting from within payment assistant and export it to Excel. So you can kinda filter it down. There's a lot of options for that. Very easy to do a lot of reporting in it. And, Danielle, you said we upload a positive pay report to our bank with check numbers, etcetera. Would we still be able to pull that information out of payment assistant to upload to the bank? Yeah. So you would just what you would do, Danielle, for positive pay is you approve the one lump sum for the payment run. So payment assistant is always going to pull the money out of your bank account as one lump sum. So you're gonna see on your bank statement an ACH debit that says payment assistant. So for positive pay, you just approve that one lump sum instead of the individual payments because they're not gonna come through as individual debits. It's always gonna be one lump sum for a payment run. And then, Libby, you asked, will we see if the payment was sent via ACH or check via Repay? You definitely will, Libby. So it's going to show you in payment assistant when you open up the bank draft because that's how everything's tracked for vendor payments. You will see, what type of payment, they're enrolled in. So if it's a check, it's gonna have a link to an image of a check. Or for virtual card ACH, it's gonna state which one and then have the last four digits of the virtual card or the last four digits of that ACH count account as well. So you'll always be able to pop in there and see what type of payment method it was. You can also see when it was paid, when it's in transit. It'll show you those designations as well. And w s, the virtual card is sent to the vendor. Who pays that? So the vendor pays that. So they pay that to their bank. Their bank takes out that fee to process that card. So they're emailed the 16 digits for the card. It's non reloadable digits each time, but the vendor pays that. They know there's a fee for it. But it is the quickest method of payment. It is the most secure. They don't have to provide their ACH information, so they are increasingly popular with the vendors. Judith, yes. You will be able to see about a check clearing so you can see if that payment has been paid. So if a vendor contacts you, we recommend the vendors go to repay, though. So repay handles payment increase. You know, we we wanna save you time. So, you know, any payment related questions or if checks need reissuing, we would send them to Repay. But you're more than welcome to, you know, help them depending on your relationship with the vendor. But, yes, you will have a payment voucher as well that will show if the payment has been paid. So you'll have that information at your fingertips as well. You can download that. You can send that out if need be. And, Celine Hussain, you asked, can approvers be set up by vendor as opposed to setting up by dollar amount? Unfortunately, they cannot. It's just for the dollar amount of the payment to the vendor. So our approval tiers go strictly by dollar amount of the payments. And I just now see that my teammate Tiffany, has been answering some of these. So sorry if, I already answered one that she did. I I just saw that she's doing the replies. Thank you so much, Tiffany, for for handling these. I just didn't see those. What is the difference from us issuing an from our account to vendors? Judith, so the difference between you issuing an EFT from your account to your vendors and payment assistance is that you don't have to download or upload the NACHA file. So we're actually doing that for you. We're giving the vendor preference on what type of payment method that they would they would like to select. So instead of going through your bank where you have more of a manual process and I'm sure there's a fee for each ACH, there is no fee for ACHs through payment assistance. So there's no fee to you. There's no fee to your vendors that accept that. And you don't have to upload or download the NACHA file for that. Alright. We're at the mark here. I don't really see many other questions coming in. Just saw one from Megan. We'll handle that, and then we'll start wrapping it up, to be respectful of everyone's time. You said, so if your vendor charges 3% when paying by credit card, would that be charged when paying with a virtual card as well? So if I understand you correctly, Megan, the vendor is not supposed to pass along any fees to you. You know, if they try to, they're not gonna be eligible to take the virtual card. So if you, you know, find out that they're trying to charge you that fee, usually, if they state that to a repay representative, they're not gonna be allowed to accept the virtual card. So we don't want any of that passed passed on to you. If I if I understood you correctly, hopefully, did. And Judith will be getting banking info from the vendor. Would Repay do that? So there's a couple ways that that could happen, Judith. You can either, you know, share that through our EFT sharing option, and then that would go right to Repay if they need it for ACH payments score. If you don't provide it, Repay would gather that from the vendors or the individuals, but they would keep that information on their side. It would not come back to you. So if Repay gathers it, it will not populate on your your vendor records. Debbie, if I decided to sign up for payment system, who will reach out to my vendors to see what payment method they prefer, Debbie Repay will reach out. So they will reach out to your vendors. They will connect with them and see what type of payment they would like to receive. Megan O'Hara, thanks. Okay. Wonderful. Got that one right for you. Glad. Wonderful questions. Definitely some some great interest here. So please, you know, book book some time with us. Go to that poll. You know, say that you would want some one on one time with us because we could give you a much more in in-depth walk through, you know, the webinar today. I know it's been very informative that we could personalize this, you know, address your one on one questions, and then do that walk through, actually do a a submission of the run. So we can submit it, show you exactly how to approve it, set up the approval tiers, you know, very great process. But we're gonna jump off now. It seems like all our questions are wrapped up. Thank you everybody for attending our webinar today. I hope it was very informative for you. For those that answered the poll that they would like more information in to meet, we look forward to meeting with you soon to provide you that personalized demonstration on payment assistance. But thank you, everyone.