City of Vista Fireside Chat: Vendor Onboarding for Government- PaymentWorks

Government agencies face unique challenges in procurement and AP workflows—including outdated processes, siloed systems, compliance rigor, and increased fraud attempts against public entities. The City of Vista, a municipality in Southern California, recognized that its manual vendor onboarding processes were slowing operations, increasing risk, and putting additional strain on a team already tasked with doing more with fewer resources.

In this fireside chat, the City of Vista shares how its procurement and AP leaders successfully implemented automated vendor onboarding for government, navigated internal change management, strengthened vendor identity verification, and modernized how the city works with vendors across departments.

Watch the City of Vista Fireside Chat and Learn How to Streamline Vendor Onboarding for Government

Hear directly from the City of Vista’s procurement and finance leaders about how they:

Modernized vendor onboarding across departments
Reduced AP fraud exposure with identity verification
Improved data accuracy and vendor experience
Built internal support for automated workflows
Navigated change management across procurement, AP, IT, and leadership
Strengthened compliance with consistent, auditable processes

The Importance of Vendor Onboarding for Government Agencies

Vendor onboarding is the foundation of a secure, compliant, and efficient procurement operation. Yet many government entities still rely on outdated, manual processes that make onboarding slow, error-prone, and vulnerable to fraud. As cyberattacks on public agencies increase and regulatory scrutiny grows, automating vendor onboarding for government is no longer optional—it’s essential.

Below is a comprehensive look at why vendor onboarding is a priority for today’s public sector leaders.

Rising Fraud Threats Make Identity Verification a Non-Negotiable

Government agencies have become prime targets for vendor impersonation, fake banking-change requests, ACH fraud, and business email compromise. Attackers know that procurement and AP teams often depend on email, spreadsheets, and phone calls to verify sensitive vendor information.

Automating vendor onboarding reduces these risks by:

Validating vendor identity and bank account ownership automatically
Eliminating manual form collection and unsecure email exchanges
Creating standardized, compliant workflows that can’t be bypassed
Ensuring consistent verification regardless of department or team structure

Government agencies cannot rely on outdated controls. Automation ensures that verification happens before payment setup, protecting taxpayer funds and reducing liability.

Eliminating Manual Work and Operational Bottlenecks

Public sector finance and procurement teams face increasing workloads—but often without additional staffing. Traditional onboarding involves:

Chasing down forms from vendors
Manually entering data into ERP systems
Calling banks to verify accounts
Tracking status across emails and spreadsheets
Resolving errors and inconsistencies

Automation streamlines this by creating a secure, guided, self-service onboarding path for vendors. Data is validated at the point of entry and automatically reconciled into standardized formats, freeing staff from repetitive administrative tasks.

This allows teams to focus on higher-value responsibilities—like compliance, supplier performance, and strategic planning.

Strengthening Compliance and Documentation Across Departments

Government agencies must maintain detailed audit trails, demonstrate internal control effectiveness, and follow strict procurement regulations. Manual onboarding makes this difficult because:

Data is stored inconsistently
Approval workflows vary by department
Vendor records become fragmented
Documentation is lost or incomplete
Automated vendor onboarding provides:
Centralized vendor identity records
Secure audit logging
Controlled, permission-based workflows
Standardized data collection aligned with compliance requirements

Automation ultimately helps procurement and finance teams ensure accuracy, transparency, and accountability across the vendor lifecycle.

Improving Vendor Experience and Public Trust

Vendors doing business with government agencies expect clarity, speed, and predictability. Manual onboarding often creates:

Slow processing times
Confusing instructions
Repetitive requests for the same information
Poor visibility into onboarding statuses
Automated workflows improve vendor experience through:
A single onboarding portal
Step-by-step guidance
Faster processing and fewer errors
Clear communication and real-time updates

A better vendor experience leads to stronger community relationships, improved project execution, and better results for the public.

Supporting Long-Term Digital Transformation Initiatives

Vendor onboarding is often one of the first—and most impactful—processes to automate in a government entity’s larger digital transformation journey. Modernizing this foundational workflow enables teams to adopt additional improvements over time, including:

AP automation
Supplier risk monitoring
Electronic payments
Contract lifecycle management
Procurement data analytics

Government entities that begin with onboarding automation establish a scalable digital foundation that benefits financial operations for years to come.

How the City of Vista Modernized Vendor Onboarding

City of Vista’s transformation didn’t happen by accident. It required intentional process redesign, strong stakeholder alignment, and a scalable automation platform. Below is a deep dive into how the team successfully implemented vendor onboarding for government using PaymentWorks.

Replacing Manual Verification with Automated Identity Controls

Before adopting PaymentWorks, Vista’s AP and procurement teams manually verified vendor information—a process that consumed significant time and created opportunities for fraud. Email-based workflows and PDF forms made it difficult to ensure consistent data quality.

PaymentWorks automated these steps by:

Validating vendor identity during onboarding
Performing bank account ownership checks
Detecting duplicate or suspicious vendors
Structuring data into standardized profiles
Eliminating the need for staff to manually confirm sensitive information

This shift dramatically reduced risk and improved accuracy across the city’s vendor master data.

Building Internal Alignment Through Change Management

Any government technology change requires strong internal buy-in. Vista succeeded because they:

Educated stakeholders on the risks of manual onboarding
Demonstrated how automation reduces errors and protects public funds
Built a cross-departmental understanding of the benefits
Communicated early and consistently about the transition
Trained staff on the new workflow using real examples

This collaborative approach allowed them to implement automation smoothly across multiple teams without resistance.

Improving Efficiency and Reducing Workload Across Teams

The city’s procurement and finance teams previously spent time:

Emailing vendors for missing information
Calling banks for verification
Re-entering data manually
Tracking onboarding status manually
Correcting inconsistent vendor profiles

With PaymentWorks, onboarding is now a guided, automated workflow, allowing staff to reallocate time toward higher-value work. The result is a more efficient, modern procurement function that supports the city’s long-term goals.

Creating a Secure, Centralized Vendor Database

With automation, Vista now maintains one standard vendor profile for each vendor—complete with identity checks, banking verification, and audit history. This provides:

Reliability across systems
Consistent data for reporting and payments
Tighter internal controls
Increased confidence across AP, procurement, and leadership

This consistent foundation strengthens compliance and reduces administrative burden.

Curious About the Various Options for Vendor Onboarding for Government? Download the Guide.

Vendor Onboarding for Government | Full Transcript

Emily Libby (00:00:03):

All righty. I think we’ll jump right in. So hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope summer is treating you all well. It’s been hot over here where Matt and I are in California, so I’m sure it is for where everyone is dialing in all across the country. I just want to say thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy schedules to join myself and Matt, with the City of Vista, for our fireside chat today. We’re super excited and honored to be here with you all, and a huge thank you to Matt for being here to share his experience. So I’m going to start us off, kick us off with introductions, then I have some light housekeeping, then we’ll jump into your world, Matt. So my-

Matt McDonald (00:00:48):

Sounds good.

Emily Libby (00:00:48):

My name is Emily Libby Rosenberg. I’m the regional sales director here in San Diego, California. Been with PaymentWorks for five years, and have the pleasure of working primarily with state and local government, higher ed, healthcare organizations, to help ensure their vendor data management and B2B payments are fraud-free. I actually had the pleasure of meeting Matt at CSMFO last year, and worked with him and the City of Vista team through their evaluation and procurement of PaymentWorks. Matt, I’ll kick it to you. Love to have you introduce yourself.

Matt McDonald (00:01:19):

Hi. My name is Matt McDonald. I am the finance manager at the City of Vista. I’ve been in this role for about three years now. I’m a former auditor with a CPA firm, and I am a CPA, and I’m happy to be here and kind of share my experience. Mine’s been absolutely positive, and I’ve gotten to know Emily and Megan very well, and I was happy to be able to help out today.

Emily Libby (00:01:43):

Wonderful. All right, well, before we jump into the good stuff, I have a few housekeeping items. There is a Q&A section for any questions. Please feel free to enter them throughout the presentation, and we’ll be sure to leave time at the end to answer them. Matt is also kind enough to stick on at the end if there are any additional questions, if you’d like to discuss some items with him one-on-one. And then as mentioned in the beginning, the session is being recorded. I’ll send it out right after the session, and you can share it with team members who maybe weren’t able to join, or anyone that you think would be interested.

(00:02:16):

So, would love to start off our discussion with, Matt, the statistics of the City of Vista. So I would love to have you share kind of city stats, what we see on the screen here, and then we can jump into your role, your team setup and structure.

Matt McDonald (00:02:33):

Sure, no problem. So as you can see right here, population about 100,000 depending on which of the census you pull from. We’re just over or just under 100,000, 18.7 square miles, over 3,000 vendors, and we spend about 126 million. A number of staff, we have two temporary now, but obviously temporary staff, so typically we’re rolling with 13 people, and then you can see our budgetary numbers right there. They’re actually going down a little bit. I would anticipate that as we revise throughout 2024, we will end up approaching closer to what we do in 2023, if not a little bit more. And then, what else did you want me to go into? I’m sorry. There was my stats, I read those, and then what’d you want me to talk about?

Emily Libby (00:03:14):

Yeah, just team setup would be great, and structure.

Matt McDonald (00:03:18):

Sure. Yeah, no problem. Okay, so our team setup is we have 13. Our city is a little deceptive, because our city is very decentralized. Most of the entry-level work would be done at the department levels through account clerks, and the 13 of us are there. Now of 13, we have somebody who’s in budget. They’re not attached to it. We have somebody who assists with budget and is a senior analyst who takes care of some sewer billing through that. That’s the one utility that we take care of in business license. So when it comes to the AP portion of it, we have an account tech who is somebody with an accounting background, who does a lot of the review portion of it. We have an accountant who backs her up, a senior accountant, and myself.

(00:03:59):

The four of us are the backbone of our comptroller team, and when it comes to AP, we’re the ones who are kind of doing all the background work in making sure. But everything is done in terms of entry and scanning and whatnot, we use Tyler Munis. All that background work is done in the department levels and through workflow it goes to us. When it comes specifically to vendor entry, that’s obviously changed because of PaymentWorks. But to go into kind of how we used to do it, and I think how a lot of cities do it, particularly if you’re in the situation where we are where you’re really running bare bones in terms of staffing. Like, how few people can we do to get the most work done? As long as the finance vendor only has to stay about 18 hours a day, then we’re fine.

(00:04:42):

But what we have for vendor entry is, it was vendors would have communication with department-level account clerks and various project managers. They would communicate all of the needed information in order to get themselves put into Tyler Munis. We would receive through workflow the approval package. We would take a look at it and approve it, but it was a lot of … Kind of again, to use the term kind of bare bones in terms of information. We made sure the W-9 was there. We made sure it matched, and that was really the biggest thing, was make sure those two things matched.

(00:05:19):

When it came to the contact information, we got it a lot of times, and sometimes it would change or it would get old or things like that, and it just wouldn’t be updated as often as we probably would like. So our vendor files, I would call them a little bit of a mess at times, not terrible. The active vendors are pretty good, but a lot of past vendors and things like that, and I’m sure things that you see. In all of the other cities and whatnot that I audited in my time, I saw a lot of the same things. That’s how we were set up prior to going to PaymentWorks.

Emily Libby (00:05:51):

And Matt, when you say decentralized and a vendor packet, that means that the departments would be collecting those forms, right, from the vendors, then sending them to you. It was all paper-based, right, so-

Matt McDonald (00:06:05):

And everything was paper-based. It was all done through email. The finance department had little to no contact with the vendors themselves, unless there was an issue down the line with billing or anything. We really didn’t have much contact or a lot of control over it. We were either the thumbs-up or thumbs-down at the very end to say, “Yes, this vendor can be active now. No, they cannot. We need this information,” and then the departments would go. And then of course, that can obviously cause some friction, right? So the departments are like, “This is good enough.” If you get a new employee in the department chair, and they’re looking at the rules and they’re saying, “Hey, I don’t need to give you this,” and we’re saying yes, or so on and so forth and back. That can cause a little friction, and a little back-and-forth and some frustration there. So, that’s how we had it done before.

Emily Libby (00:06:49):

Thank you, Matt. I appreciate you educating the masses on how you did it before and-

Matt McDonald (00:06:54):

I’m sure most people on here know the story. I’m sure they all … Many of them have the same exact thoughts that I’m having.

Emily Libby (00:06:59):

Yes, decentralized, vendor packet, email being insecure. You know, I think in all transparency, when you and I met it was … I don’t know if you were necessarily looking for a solution to solve for vendor onboarding that moment, but the timing was kind of serendipitous. Would love to hear kind of how you did start to think about wanting to make a change, and what you were looking for future state.

Matt McDonald (00:07:23):

Well, I think my thought is, you get within a system and you kind of get used to it, so you don’t necessarily see what’s wrong with it until you examine it from a different view. What you and I had initially talked about was EFT payments, and the issue that I was looking at was quite frankly the cost of writing checks, the amount of time it took to do it, and so on. That was the part that I wasn’t real happy with. I was like, “We’ve got to do something about this one.” But we were very nervous about going with EFT because of our structure. I had talked to some other cities that were doing it and they were like, “Well, we’ve got to call all the vendors. We’ve got to do so many things to avoid fraud.”

(00:08:02):

Just when I looked at our system, I went to the director and I said, “Look, if we go to EFT I don’t think I can provide enough internal controls to adequately protect the system,” because I don’t control the department level entry. I don’t control that contact, and I know how busy they are. Not to say that they wouldn’t do the job, only to say they’re really busy. It would be easy for them, if they’re going to skip a step, to skip one. Think, “It’s fine,” and have an error go through, and that was kind of my big fear.

(00:08:31):

So you and I talked, and I was just like, “Hey, what’s this?” As you began to describe it I was like, “Oh, this solves the problems for me.” And then that was my initial entry, and then of course later, we talked about the process in order to secure the vendors as part of like the whole payment process, then vendor onboarding became a thing. And now I could realize that not only would I be going to departments and saying, “Hey, we can do EFT payments,” I can go to the city manager, “Hey, I can save you money on this thing here with checks.” But I could also tell the departments, “Look, we’re going to take this work off your hands. We’re going to utilize this automated system to do what you used to do, and the vendors are going to have control of that information themselves. They’re going to be able to protect themselves.” And I can turn to the vendors and say, “We can pay you faster, but you can keep it safe.”

(00:09:19):

And that was really, for me it was like, “Okay, that’s a no-brainer.” To be able to say all those things was like, “Okay, this is a good sales pitch to my city, to the city council,” who also was like, “Why don’t we pay this other way? Why are we always writing checks all the time?” Just, it seems a little archaic at this time, right? “We’re still doing checks the way we would do them in like 1980, so why are we doing it that way?” That would be it.

Emily Libby (00:09:45):

1980, fax machines, yeah. It’s like-

Matt McDonald (00:09:47):

Exactly, yeah.

Emily Libby (00:09:48):

How do you get to the 21st century? And just-

Matt McDonald (00:09:50):

I’m dipping my quill, and then … You know, it was hard.

Emily Libby (00:09:53):

Yeah, the pigeon came.

Matt McDonald (00:09:55):

Well actually, if there was an emergent check, at one point for certain things we had a typewriter we had to use. It would crack me up. You’d take it out, you’d blow the dust off it, ching, and da, da, da. It was awful.

Emily Libby (00:10:07):

Well, I’m so glad we met, and I’m glad that the initial onus was on, how can we shift to EFT or ACH securely? I think you, like a lot of people that I talk to when I first meet them, they think that vendoring and payments are separated, right? But the great thing is, you can solve those together and it’s actually really important to solve them together, because the whole point of onboarding vendors into Tyler Munis is to make sure that they get paid, and you’re making sure that you’re paying the right payee.

Matt McDonald (00:10:38):

So also very serendipitous at the time, because we were having conversations with J.P. Morgan to change our credit card provider. We were working with them, and we really got along well with the J.P. Morgan team. I say were; they still are, but at the time they also were … To try to pay with credit cards. What the other part of the onboarding process did is it solved another problem for me. How do I get people to sign up initially for credit card payments so I can have rebate revenue, or them, they could sign up for EFTs so that I could save money on checks?

(00:11:11):

And then finally it was like but people still … Some people are like, “No, I have to have a check,” or, “I still have to do wire.” That was an option too, and the onboarding process, kind of that window and the options that the vendors have when they first sign up, that gave them … That gave me an easy way for me to show vendors different ways to be paid without having to make a bunch of phone calls, or trying to talk people into it, or so on and so forth. It all fit very nicely together with J.P. Morgan’s recruitment process.

Emily Libby (00:11:40):

That is terrific. Thank you for reminding me of that, and letting folks know on the line. Because I think the power of getting off of checks is not just to shift to ACH, EFT, even like Zelle or Venmo-type payments, but it’s also this virtual card program which I’m just so excited that you’re going to be able to capture vendors on the front end, right? I think the old way, the old process was, onboard vendors into your ERP, then either have the bank or your team call to get vendors on a virtual card. Let’s switch that paradigm and get them on right at the get-go, right? So that’s huge, and I would love to hear more about your vision, your goals around the payments strategy. So you mentioned getting off checks was number one priority. Would you say that it was kind of equal parts wanting to get vendors onto virtual card and ACH? Is it virtual card first, then ACH? Would love to just hear a little bit more about your goals around your payment strategy.

Matt McDonald (00:12:40):

Well, the virtual card was first because of the rebate revenue. But the ACH was like … You know, it’s 1A, 1B. Either one of them is a victory for us because we’re getting off checks, and that saves a significant amount of money. The virtual card was a great sales point also, because when we talked about our ability to gain rebate revenue, finance does not often have a revenue-generating structure. It’s not what we’re for. We’re not there to make money. We’re there to protect the city’s assets. We’re there to make sure that internal controls and the financial reporting are all accurate. But the ability to do this is also what allowed me to change an account clerk to an account tech in my own department, which allowed me to have a more qualified person, somebody with a higher level of education, somebody who … Not to say the account clerks aren’t great. But from a union standpoint, I was able to assign more to a tech than I could to a clerk, regardless of what the clerk could do.

(00:13:30):

Actually, my tech was the clerk. I promoted her to a position I felt she was qualified for, and so we were able to do that because of that little bit of a revenue stream and it really helped a great deal. It really has made a huge difference. And so for us, virtual card was first. ACH is second, and then if people choose checks or wires then that’s what they choose. There are people who choose to do that, and it’s totally fine, but it will be at a fraction of what it used to be, and it will take less time.

(00:13:57):

The other thing is, as we go more hybrid and we go more remote, I can do … I can run an electronic check run anywhere. Checks, I’ve got to be there for to print and put in the mail myself. That is another time-consuming process, and it does force us to put somebody in a chair next to the printer at least once a week. And then under this new system, as we begin to shift more and more people over to the EFT, we can start doing things like, “Okay. We’re going to do two payment runs a week, and every other week we’ll do check runs.” So we can pay more often for less, faster. The vendors are going to like the fact that they can get paid faster. And then, I only need to be in the office every other week to print checks, and that’s it. It makes it much easier for us to deal with it.

(00:14:42):

It’s much more time-consuming, and it allows us to have a better … Like a hybrid schedule. Something else I wouldn’t have really … When I signed up for PaymentWorks I wasn’t thinking, “Well, what if we go to hybrid schedule?” Because my city wasn’t doing that, and this isn’t why we did it. But now that we have done it, it has made this easier … or this has made that easier.

Emily Libby (00:15:00):

Amazing, Matt. I’m so excited for you all with that hybrid next phase.

Matt McDonald (00:15:05):

I am very excited about working from home twice a week. That is nice, yeah. I am quite lazy when it comes to commuting. I don’t want to do it.

Emily Libby (00:15:13):

And it’s not that hard where we live, but …

Matt McDonald (00:15:15):

No, no, no. It’s easy, and I still … That’s how lazy I am. I still don’t want to do it.

Emily Libby (00:15:19):

I feel you.

Matt McDonald (00:15:20):

Yeah.

Emily Libby (00:15:21):

So I want to talk about validations for a second. Let’s just take a quick step back, because I can remember when you were going through the evaluation process you said to me, “All right, there’s a world with PaymentWorks getting vendors onto ACH. There’s a world without PaymentWorks getting vendors onto ACH.” You had this Excel spreadsheet of all the time that it would take to validate ACH, to make calls, what that equated to into salary. You were kind of, if you don’t mind me saying, terrified of the prospect of having staff validate ACH information outside of PaymentWorks. Do you mind just talking-

Matt McDonald (00:15:57):

I believe what we looked at, every week it would have taken 4,000 hours. No, not that long, but it was going to take a long time. The idea of, you know, we do hundreds of checks every week. If we were to switch even half of those over there, the idea of having the one person I have make that phone call, or taking somebody else off of other stuff and having them help out to confirm the information, it really was not something that … Because I can’t control it. I can’t see it. I can implement internal controls, and design them so that the departments do them, but I can’t enforce it or show that they did it or what they got. I just didn’t have faith that that would be a strong way of doing it, particularly when you’re looking at, it really takes one transaction. One large transaction you have theft on, it’s a big deal.

(00:16:46):

And in a city where everything is political … We all know that portion of it. When you’re looking at it, if $10,000 … It may not be a big part of your budget, but it is … I always look at it this way. If I have to explain it to a reporter as it goes in the newspaper, why $25,000 is gone, because we didn’t do something … Me saying, “We don’t have enough people to make phone calls” is not going to play well. That’s not something that I am comfortable with, and it’s not something I felt I could adequately protect based on those standards. So for me, it was either we do something to automate this process, change our staffing level, or not do it.

(00:17:20):

That was my recommendation, and the finance director Mike Sylvia is great. He completely agreed. He absolutely was like, “We’ve got to be very careful.” We, like everybody else, have read the articles of, million dollars here, $100,000 there, $25,000 there, that had gotten stolen. Unfortunately these cities could be amazing, but the only thing we know about them is that they lost $25,000 to an EFT fraud because a phone call didn’t get made, or somebody snuck their way through. It’s not fair to the employees there, because they shouldn’t be judged on one thing, but that’s just reality. So that was our fear. That was what really made me think, “Okay, either we find a solution or we don’t do it.”

Emily Libby (00:17:58):

Yeah. Yeah, I remember being on site with you, Mike, Lori, and you were all like, “There’s just no way we’re going to be in the news. There’s no way. We’re going to do everything we can to protect our taxpayer dollars.” And someone that lives in the same area, I really appreciate that about you and how forward-thinking you were, as you were looking for a way to move to electronic payments. And now, when your payees are getting onto ACH through PaymentWorks, and of course virtual card through JPM, you’re fully protected, right? Your fraud protection-

Matt McDonald (00:18:30):

Well, I think the big thing also was is the insurance policy. To be able to say, “For any approved vendor, we have two million dollars of insurance per incident, no limit per year.” Just be like, “Okay, that’s pretty good.” And I will say, we did a lot of research on that one because I had to justify it. I worked with our risk management team, who went to the insurance agencies and said, “Look, this is the insurance around this type of activity is changing. It’s probably not going to be covered in liability insurance anymore. It’s going to have its own thing, and it is going to be expensive. It could be a second liability.”

(00:19:04):

So to be able to say, “Hey, look. We’re going to be forward-thinking.” We’re going to knock this out now, because the circumstances to which that would even be protected are … Chances are if anybody made any mistakes, you’re not covered for it and that money is just gone. There’s nothing you can do about it, so particularly with an EFT. It’s not like a wire. You can’t pull that back. It’s not a credit card transaction. It’s just gone. So the ability to be able to say, “Hey, look. Even if something does go wrong, we have this,” and the fact that the system is secure enough that our insurance company felt like they could give that policy, that was a nice little blanket for everybody to go, “Okay, I’m very comfortable.”

Emily Libby (00:19:41):

Yeah. Yeah, it’s one thing when you speak with different companies who are like, “Oh, yeah. We validate. You’re going to be all good.” And then you’re like, “Well, in the contract, do we have a warranty? Are we indemnified?” They’re like, “No, don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine.” It’s like-

Matt McDonald (00:19:54):

“No, you’ll be good. It should work fine, whatever. It’s all good. Flip the coin. Let’s see what happens.” Mm-mmm.

Emily Libby (00:19:59):

You’ve got to walk the walk and talk the talk, so I really appreciated all your research, Matt. And just for the folks that are on the call today, it’s a very interesting exercise to do what Matt did. Go to your risk team and ask, “Do we have coverage for business email compromise, or social engineering fraud?” This is the type of fraud that is the largest source of cybercrime, but as Matt said, is diminishing in coverage, diminishing. Even our insurer, Chubb, shares that they don’t cover folks who have a manual, antiquated … The quill-and-ink process, as Matt and I described before.

(00:20:40):

So Matt, if you don’t mind, I’d love to shift gears to change management. Everyone’s favorite word, right? Change. I know it can be hard in especially local government, because a lot of things have been done for many years the same way, right? And it can be hard, especially in decentralized environments, to get folks on the page that you are right? That forward-thinking, this change is good, this change is protection, this change is actually good for departments. Do you mind just sharing a little bit about your experience implementing PaymentWorks, the change management, and how you were able to be successful at it?

Matt McDonald (00:21:14):

Well sure, and you know it’s funny, because I actually have talked to some other cities and had conversations, and I was surprised to find out how many kind of were in the same boat I was in, because always your own situation feels very unique and everybody else is doing better than you. That’s how it feels, but it’s not true. When I first started working there, I mean our big focus was on looking at some antiquated systems. We had, as a department, we were very tied to some of the old ways of doing things. There was a lot of paper processes. There was a lot of information held in departments. There was a lot of things that we just felt we needed to do.

(00:21:47):

So we had, in the last couple years, we had implemented work flows through Munis, and moved the scanning to the department level and there was … So we added a contract module. We added the … I’m sorry, the grant module and whatnot. And while all of these were ultimately good, change is typically dealt with a great deal of suspicion. There will always be at least one or two people who are like, “No, I don’t want to do it. I will not change,” and they’re very tied to the old way. There’s a lot of, “I don’t understand why we have to do this,” and there was a lot of that. This was no different than that process right here.

(00:22:22):

Because it actually, in this particular case, PaymentWorks was really just about taking work off of people. So when it came to like, “Here’s the new policies and procedures,” there was not a lot of pushback there. Because it was like it was me just saying, “You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to do this.” That’s great. I don’t have to call vendors and get a W-9. I can just send them this thing and they’ll take care of it, and finance is able to back us up, and finance is not adding a ton of work, either.

(00:22:44):

The biggest area of change management for us … There was a lot of fear from various departments about how their vendors were going to deal with this. There was a lot of fear, and I think for me it was hard because I’m like, “They’re our vendors. We pay them, you know?” That was my attitude. It’s like, “We’re the customer here.” Not to say that, “Hey, the customer’s always right. They have to do everything we say.” That’s not realistic, but to some extent we can ask for things. There was a lot of fear in that. And what I have found is … Because we have slow-rolled it through, because we’re doing the integration process as well, and that’s what we’re working in now. But we haven’t had a lot of pushback. I have reached out to friendly vendors and kind of got their opinion of it, and I asked and said, “Hey, do you mind if we do a test run on you guys?”

(00:23:26):

We ran some internal transactions through your testing process, and then we had a vendor who we paid. We were like, “All right, you filled this out for me, great. How was that process?” And they were like, “Yeah, it was a piece of cake. It’s no big deal.” And then I was like, “Good,” and then we paid them. And then when they called me they were like, “I got it same day.” We sent it that morning. It’s not always going to be same day, I assume, but we sent it that morning and they got it that day. They were like, “Okay, that’s awesome. I like this. I like getting paid that fast,” and so it was largely positive there.

(00:23:51):

And there were some vendors who were just like, “No, I shouldn’t have to do it. I don’t want to do that,” but it is really far and few between. I would say almost every vendor has just gone, “Okay.” Most of them realize, “Hey, this is my customer. This is how they want to get paid. This is what they require. Yeah, no problem,” and it’s not a lot of work for them, either. It’s really just saying, “Everything you would normally do for us over the phone or through emails, you just do in this one place and then we’re done.”

Emily Libby (00:24:16):

Exactly.

Matt McDonald (00:24:16):

And then we’ll know that the address is good. We know that your taxpayer ID is good. We know that you are not a debarred vendor from the federal list, so I don’t have to worry about … Particularly when I spent federal funds my fear is always, “What if they’re debarred?” We were checking once at the beginning, but if they had gotten debarred later then I probably wouldn’t have known. There’s just no time to check that many. But now, your system is just checking on an ongoing basis so that I know, “Okay, they’re not debarred. I can still pay them with federal dollars, and I’m not going to have a problem with the federal government during an audit.” So, that’s also something that’s very nice.

Emily Libby (00:24:49):

Amazing. Thank you so much, Matt. And I would love to stick on the topic of onboarding existing vendors, because I actually did see Diane Starkey … Thank you very much for the question … Around talking through the process of onboarding existing vendors to PaymentWorks. Is your plan, Matt, to do a cadence where you’re just going to focus on new vendors, existing vendors, getting vendors onto virtual card and ACH? Or maybe you could just talk a little bit about your plan for onboarding existing vendors.

Matt McDonald (00:25:18):

Well, so when it comes to the existing vendors, we’re doing it in a staged approach. So the system itself is designed so essentially the process of getting a vendor on now is, my department just has to go in, enter the email into the PaymentWorks system. It’s a pretty easy thing, and then just send it off. The department has the ability to approve it so that if something in the department … The management analyst, the project manager, just wants to make sure the vendor that they’re sending it to is correct, the information is right, they approve it. Then it goes out, and it’s gone. And so from that point on, the vendor just kind of takes over. It’s a piece of cake. They enter everything in.

(00:25:55):

But the system itself, when they see it and they go … The first thing it shows is virtual card, and then it shows ACH, and it shows this, and we could put whatever we want afterwards. If we wanted to say, “We can pay faster this way,” if we wanted to say, “This is more convenient,” whatever we want to say after each one, to kind of encourage people to go to that one. We work with our legal department to determine what we’re allowed to do and what we have to put on there, and so on and so forth. We’ve got that up there, so they immediately see it and can just simply select whatever they want to choose.

(00:26:25):

So it’s really not a sales process from us, in terms of getting them on virtual card or anything else. We just list the options in order of our preference and that’s it. They can choose it or not choose it as they want to, and they can always change it later. So if later they realize, “You know what? I do want to get paid faster,” or, “Hey, I need this,” and they experience it and they go, “Oh, that was easy.” But obviously, if you have somebody who’s getting $100,000 in payments, or two million dollars in payments per year as a contractor, they’re probably not going to want to do a virtual card. They’re not going to want to give 3% to a credit card. You just choose ACH and it’s fine. They can still get the benefit of being paid fast.

Emily Libby (00:26:59):

And to that point, for Diane’s question, would you say that some of those top tier [inaudible 00:27:05]?

Matt McDonald (00:27:04):

I’m sorry, yeah.

Emily Libby (00:27:05):

That’s okay.

Matt McDonald (00:27:05):

So to answer it, so what we did essentially is we needed to adjust to the workload, and I wanted to see in live how that would go. So what we did is, kind of the mandate to the departments was number one, if you have a new vendor, they have to go in through PaymentWorks [inaudible 00:27:20]. Number two, if you have a current vendor that is making you change their file … A new W-9, a change of address, anything at all … Then what you’re going to do is you’re going to send them the PaymentWorks link and they’re going to sign up that way. So we do it only with new vendors, and existing ones that change.

(00:27:33):

As we have noted that the workflow for us is not really that much of a big deal, we are now expanding and we’ll start going to other vendors, and vendors that currently exist that we could get into our system now. But that’s how we’ve tiered it, and it’s been … And for the moment, because we’re at year end, we are in our dual check run process. There’s a lot of processes that have to be done. We’re slow-rolling it out that way, and we’re not treating it like we have to get everybody in tomorrow. We’re doing it over a time period that kind of works with us and works with our departments and works with our vendors, so it’s a big partnership that way.

Emily Libby (00:28:11):

Terrific, thank you. And Diane, hope that helps. Feel free to jump in with any other questions on that. Matt, Lisa has a question around approving vendors through workflow.

Matt McDonald (00:28:20):

Uh-huh.

Emily Libby (00:28:21):

And we get this quite a bit, because many customers in state and local use Munis or Tyler Technologies, and have a Vendor Self Service portal. However, you decided not to use Vendor Self Service because you’re using PaymentWorks as that vendor portal. Do you mind just clarifying the approving vendors through workflow, what that means?

Matt McDonald (00:28:41):

So there’s an onboarding process through PaymentWorks, that you look and you can see the onboarding tracker. There’s the initial step of sending the invitation out. There’s an approval for the invitation at the department level, to ensure that the vendor contact information is correct. Then there’s the approval process that goes on through PaymentWorks itself, once the vendor has entered the information. So PaymentWorks looks and determines, “Is this an accurate bank account? Is this a correct bank account? Is the bank account the one that you should be sending money to? Are they a debarred vendor? Does the address match up?”

(00:29:09):

So and all that, and then finally there’s an approval process through us. Now, as we are not fully integrated yet, we would then … In finance, we would take the vendor information and we would enter it into Munis ourselves, which eliminates the need for the Munis workflow approval. Which is, the vendor workflow approval design is a little different in Munis for vendors than it is, because it’s a group workflow thing that I still don’t fully understand. But we built it and we got it going, but I didn’t love it. But it is, we enter it ourselves, so the workflow approval takes place entirely in PaymentWorks.

(00:29:41):

Now, it’s entered. Now eventually when the integration is done then, once we have completed the approvals in PaymentWorks, it’ll auto-download into Munis and then I don’t have to do that part of it again. That’s one of the reasons why we slow-rolled the existing vendors. As you saw, we have over 3,000 vendors. If they all said yes in one week, there’s no way I could enter those in manually. But once the integration is done, then we’ll be in a much better position to simply do it because it’ll all be automated. Then it won’t have any effect on workflow, or a very light effect on workflow for us.

Emily Libby (00:30:16):

Perfect. Thank you very much, Matt. Yeah, and just for folks on the line, our system can be used without full-on integration, like Matt described, or you can full-on integrate when you launch. It’s totally up to you. Most of our customers do like to do the phased approach, just so that they can get validations and indemnification in just six weeks, to go live with PaymentWorks, but totally up to you. Matt, Linda is wondering about storing banking information. So, do you keep the banking and routing information of the vendors in Munis, and can you discuss the file upload process to the bank?

Matt McDonald (00:30:51):

Sure, no problem. So when it comes to the payment information, no. We chose a tokenized option, so I believe as administrator I can see the banking information, and that is it. The information is not stored on city computers, which was another sales point for me. I didn’t want the liability of having banking information for vendors on our own computers, in case of a hack, so all of the information is stored in PaymentWorks so the liability is all theirs. Sorry, Em, it’s yours. So we don’t have any in our system at all. We do mark in the system that they’re PaymentWorks vendors so that we know, from the Munis file, that this person is approved for PaymentWorks, but that’s kind of it when it comes down to it.

(00:31:32):

We do also update most of the other information that we don’t normally have, like we don’t always get multiple email addresses or phone numbers and whatnot. We will update our information based on what they put in PaymentWorks. I have found that vendors are far more willing to be very complete in the information they give when they’re doing it on PaymentWorks, and they’re having to fill out every line in this, than they are when they email us. They just kind of give us the bare bones and do the email. We get more complete information this way. When it comes to the uploading process, there’s two things probably to talk about with this one.

(00:32:05):

We use B of A, and in the initial implementation phase of it, when it came to the communication of our bank and PaymentWorks, PaymentWorks did that. I had very little … The only times I ever had to step in is if my bank was being very unresponsive, which unfortunately did happen, not to impugn B of A. I’m sure you all have your experiences with your banks, but there were times when things would get slow-rolled because they just weren’t responding. That’s the only time I ever stepped in. I have no idea how any of it works when it comes to the communication between these two. I don’t have to, and I’m glad, because I am an accountant, not an IT guy, so that part was done.

(00:32:47):

When it comes to the upload process, for us it was very simple. You’re uploading a simple file into the PaymentWorks site, I believe. I don’t do it myself. My accountant does it. She knows better than I do, but it’s a simple upload process. It’s very quick. It’s very easy. It doesn’t really take much time, and it’s faster than our check-writing process was.

Emily Libby (00:33:07):

Terrific, thank you so much. That’s great. So one of our questions is around vendors getting their emails hacked, which is exactly what we were talking about a few minutes ago. It’s called business email compromise, where vendors are getting hacked into. Fraudsters are posing as vendors, and that’s literally exactly why we exist, to prevent you from paying a fraudster. So if an email is … An invitation is sent to the fraudster, our fraud team typically catches it right away. We have a plethora of checks. I wanted to see, Matt, if you wouldn’t mind sharing the fraud that we caught for you in your first, what is it, week of going live?

Matt McDonald (00:33:44):

Well actually, it was pre-launch. So we did have an attempted fraud. So we had, through our ARPA funding, we had a grant program for local businesses. One of the businesses had been awarded I think like $6,000 or something like that as part of this program. The check had not been cashed yet. They were reaching out and saying, “Hey, we’re having trouble cashing the check. Would you mind doing this as an EFT? Our bank is giving us a problem.” The department, which was our economic development department, which is two people, were like, “Oh.” They reached out to us like, “Hey, can you help them with this?”

(00:34:16):

I was suspicious of the email, and we were not live with PaymentWorks yet in that we weren’t fully utilizing it. We were still learning on our end, but it was a fully-built system so it could be used. This was like, we would launch two or three days later. So I said, “Yeah, no problem.” But I told my team, “Send them the PaymentWorks link. I don’t want to do an EFT on our own. Let’s utilize this tool.” And so we sent that out to them, and we got no response. They did not sign up for it. We called and reached out to see what was going on, and the phone number was a little [inaudible 00:34:51]. I couldn’t get to … The voicemail was full, and I was like, “Okay, this is clearly something’s wrong. I’m glad we used … We didn’t do it.”

(00:34:56):

We would get an email the next day from the actual vendor who said, “Somebody hacked my email. This is a fake. Don’t send them.” And of course the department just ran over like, “Don’t send the check.” And I’m like, “We didn’t. We didn’t send them anything. We just sent it through PaymentWorks, and they didn’t sign up. Because they didn’t sign up, we didn’t send them anything,” so money saved. And I can’t say 100% we would have just sent the check out. We’re certainly not naïve in this one. But it did feel good to know that this got caught. In the future, I won’t bother calling the vendor. I won’t do any of that. I’ll just put them in PaymentWorks. If they won’t sign up, then they’re not going to get paid EFT and I don’t have to do it anymore.

(00:35:39):

So it was a really good feeling to go to my finance director and city manager and say, “By the way, somebody just tried to steal $6,000 from us.” That’s a very small amount of money for an EFT fraud, but I don’t want to be asked about $6,000 that’s missing that I’ve got to redo, so particularly from a federal program, something like ARPA which will … It’s going to be audited every year. We’re going to have to answer for it every year, so I was real glad about that, yeah.

Emily Libby (00:36:05):

Yeah, and just for the folks on the line, when you’re fully live with PaymentWorks, it’s our team that is doing those … The research, the calls. Matt’s team is incredible, did that prior to going fully live, but that would be taken off of your plate. So I just want to make sure that you all are understanding that this is really something that we are taking the burden off of the staff’s plates, that are typically doing the validation, so that Matt, you can sleep better at night and go to Thailand on vacation.

Matt McDonald (00:36:34):

Which is, by the way, that’s the background picture. If you’d like to go to Thailand, this is what it will look like. It is amazing. Also, the other thing I guess I can really talk about is because you were mentioning like the banking process, and the processor fraud, which was the onboarding, just in how you guys work with the bank. The whole process of bringing your software on for us was … I mean, it’s a complex software. You’re integrating your bank to this, and Munis to this, and you’re changing your process to this, so it’s a lot.

(00:37:09):

But I did find that the team over at PaymentWorks … I worked with Sydney. She was the project manager. She took real ownership of that. I usually end up having to kind of project-manage these things a lot myself. I didn’t do that at all. It’s like, she was just on it. Like if I got involved she was like, “Don’t worry, Matt. We got it.” I’m like, “Oh, okay,” so that part was easy. There was Ashley, who was our trainer, and she did a great job. There are training videos, and you guys were also watching to make sure that we’re doing the training videos. I thought it was great, because it’s so easy to forget and go, “Oh yeah, we did it.” No, we had to do it. We did it, and they were short. They were all like two or three minutes.

Emily Libby (00:37:44):

[inaudible 00:37:46]

Matt McDonald (00:37:45):

I was like, “Okay, yeah.” No, no, no, but they were short, too. Because it’s like, “Okay, I’ve got 10 minutes. I’m going to do two of these trainings,” and I was able to get it done, no problem. And then, I was able to kind of set up SOPs and everything for the entire department. I could just put links to your site. I didn’t have to write a lot of stuff. I didn’t have to write anything. I’d either download the SOPs and put them up on the SharePoint site that our city uses for training, or I’d do links to your videos and I would just tell … And then we did a big teams training.

(00:38:12):

I was basically like, “Here’s the basics of how it works, and here are all the SOPs. Go there and read them.” And from the city’s standpoint, all people ever had to learn was, “How do I send the implementation email, and how do I approve the implementation?” That initial invitation email, that’s it, so it was real simple from that side. The training was really in finance, and even then we didn’t all have to learn all of it, but it was pretty simple.

Emily Libby (00:38:37):

Awesome.

Matt McDonald (00:38:38):

Yeah, for something that’s complex, it was a smooth process.

Emily Libby (00:38:41):

That’s great. So there’s implementation of PaymentWorks, which you’ve done. You’re live, you’re onboarding your vendors and you’re managing changes. Then there’s integration. Joyce is wondering about when you’re planning to integrate, and maybe why wait to integrate? Was that because of IT resources? Or maybe you could just share about your plan for integration with Munis.

Matt McDonald (00:39:02):

Oh, the initial plan to wait to integrate was actually a discussion with PaymentWorks. They said it’s a good idea to utilize the system manually for just a time, for a time period, so that you have a real understanding of it. And then also when the integration comes, there’s a better understanding of how that implementation should take place. So the initial plan was, we got this started I want to say in like, what, May or April? To do this for a couple of months, and then get the integration going. Based on our schedule, we would have started in August.

(00:39:31):

The only delay for us now is, our IT department is only six people for the city. It’s ridiculously small, so they don’t have a ton of resources. So they’re actually contracting with a company that only does integrations, and that company will exist just to provide integrations and maintain them. So essentially all of our integrations would be like, PaymentWorks to [inaudible 00:39:56] or something like that, whatever the company is called … Velosimo, that’s right, and Munis to Velosimo. They will keep track of both. That is not the typical way. Normally it’s just Munis to PaymentWorks and done, and then our IT department plus Munis would work with PaymentWorks to do so. But because we have this other option that IT is doing, they’ve asked us to, “Hey, could you let us get this contract set up and let them run it? That way, we don’t have to do any of it.” And I’m always happy to not do something, so we held off for that reason.

(00:40:29):

But that was why, and I think it was good because we do have a better understanding of the information that is coming into our system, how the two processes need to communicate with each other. And so when we’re talking about the integration now, we can do so with a more educated eye. Because I think in the beginning you would have thought, “Well, integrate everything or just these bare-bones things, or whatever.” Now I can really say, “This is the information that needs to flow from PaymentWorks to Munis to make everything work successfully.” I know it because we’ve had to do it.

(00:40:57):

But I also say that the process of doing it manually has not … Was not the work pill I feared it would be. I thought it would be much bigger, and then now that we’ve done it for a while we’re finding, “Okay, this is relatively simple to do this manually for the time being.” Though I am very much looking forward to the integration process, because I think the flow of information from Munis to the vendor portals, when they can see where their invoices are, will be better if I’m not doing it manually.

Emily Libby (00:41:21):

And that’s the Munis integration through that Velosimo, is going to be on prem or is it hosted?

Matt McDonald (00:41:28):

That one will be hosted.

Emily Libby (00:41:28):

Hosted.

Matt McDonald (00:41:29):

Normally, this would have been on prem had we not gone this other way. But like I said, there’s a unique circumstance that caused us to delay, so I don’t have my full timeframe. I’m hoping I’m still going to be in the next month or so, but I don’t have control of that now. But I think ultimately it will be better, because we’ll have people who are … That’s all they do, and they’ll monitor it for the life of the bridge, for the APIs. That part will run smoother, but that’s how we’re doing it.

Emily Libby (00:41:55):

All right, we have three minutes. We’re going to do power round question.

Matt McDonald (00:41:58):

Go. Fire away.

Emily Libby (00:41:59):

So, if a supplier refuses to register through PaymentWorks, do you not allow them to be paid via ACH? Do you change their payment terms, net 30, net 60?

Matt McDonald (00:42:06):

Payment terms are going to have to … Well, they’ll follow the payment terms that are normally in our purchase order agreements or contracts, depending on how they go, and we will hold them to that one. They can only be paid via check or wire.

Emily Libby (00:42:17):

Nice.

Matt McDonald (00:42:18):

Yeah, that’d be it. Yeah, we’d do virtual card as well, but ACH they cannot do.

Emily Libby (00:42:22):

Nice, thank you. Hopefully that helps, Jill. You mentioned approving vendors before it gets into Munis with PaymentWorks. What is your team looking for when they are reviewing and approving the vendors?

Matt McDonald (00:42:33):

Well, at this point they’re looking to make sure that PaymentWorks has signed off on most of the information. That portion of it is fine, and to make sure that the W-9 agrees to what they have put into the system.

Emily Libby (00:42:42):

[inaudible 00:42:44]

Matt McDonald (00:42:44):

If those two agree, then we’re good.

Emily Libby (00:42:46):

Okay, so no more [inaudible 00:42:48]-

Matt McDonald (00:42:48):

And a business license. Okay, good, good, good. You’re good.

Emily Libby (00:42:51):

Not necessarily validation, but just kind of a high-level approver making sure things look good. They can see that PaymentWorks has verified the address, the TINs, the ACH, the OFAC list, and you click approve.

Matt McDonald (00:43:02):

Well, through the implementation process we were able to understand exactly what it was PaymentWorks looks for, how they look for it, and [inaudible 00:43:09]. I have a great deal of comfort that their methodology, because of the resources they put towards this one particular task, are better than what I can get from one person who is doing many things, looking over this one. So, we do a basic check, W-9 to this, and do they have a business license as required by our municipal code, and then that’s it.

Emily Libby (00:43:25):

Perfect. Not sure if you know this yet, Matt, but since you’ve implemented, do you know how much your check payments have decreased?

Matt McDonald (00:43:34):

Right now, the amount of it is not huge yet because I have put things to slow. It’s just for new vendors and whatnot. But it has had a several percentage point decrease. It is going faster, and it is something that is, as we continue to do it, it’s moving faster and faster and faster. So I would anticipate over the course of this year we’re going to see a significant decrease. We’ve seen a lot of positive reviews from our vendors, and as we do that, the departments gain comfort in it, and they push harder and harder and harder with it.

Emily Libby (00:44:08):

Awesome. Thank you, Matt. And I know we have one minute left, so I totally understand if people have to start trickling out. I’m going to go through the rest of the questions. Even if you leave, I’ll send the recording right after. But Matt, you were kind enough to say you’d stay on for a little bit too-

Matt McDonald (00:44:20):

No problem.

Emily Libby (00:44:20):

If anyone wants to submit their questions. But I definitely get this question a lot, around how departments change as it relates to staffing. Are staff reduced? Are they reallocated? So one of the questions is, how has your AP department been impacted? Has the City of Vista added, reduced staffing, reallocated in response to the PaymentWorks process?

Matt McDonald (00:44:42):

We used to have two account clerks to take care of our AP process. Because of the integration and because of the virtual card revenue, we were able to change one account clerk from an account clerk to an account tech, which provides a higher level of review and knowledge ability, and allows me to have them do more. The other account clerk I reassigned to our accounts receivable and collections, which had fallen behind because that had been … The pieces of that job had been combined all over, and so it was not being done to the level I would like it to do. So I was able to dedicate a single person to do that particular job, and that has cleared up my collections. We’ve been able to reduce the amount of debt out there a significant amount.

Emily Libby (00:45:21):

Beautiful. Thank you, Matt. I really appreciate that. Question around 1099s. The question is, do you or PaymentWorks send out 1099 forms to vendors? PaymentWorks does not send 1099s. I just want to make sure folks know, we do help collect the 1099 information on the front end. But Matt, how do you send 1099s, just right out of Munis?

Matt McDonald (00:45:42):

We do the 1099s through Munis. The area that we’ll see the decrease in is, as we use PaymentWorks and we use the virtual card option and are able to sell it that way, the credit card company will send the 1099s for payments like that. So that does reduce the burden on us indirectly through the credit card payments, but the rest of it is done as it would normally be done, which is through our regular Munis system that if all of you … Those of you using Tyler Munis, or what it’s called now Enterprise ERP you are able to … It doesn’t really change the process much with that. I would say the biggest thing is, is that you have confidence that the information that you have on hand is going to be more current and it is going to be more accurate.

Emily Libby (00:46:21):

Okay, terrific. Thank you. One of the questions from Linda is, how long have you been on PaymentWorks?

Matt McDonald (00:46:28):

Well, we started this process some time ago with Emily. The overall sales process was several months long, and so there was a lot of learning curve there. The implementation process was a month or two, I want to say. We have been utilizing the system sometime I think since April, maybe March or May. I don’t remember the exact time frame of when we started, but it’s been a couple of months now, enough to see the differences and changes in our system as we’ve been able to move forward with it.

Emily Libby (00:46:56):

Thank you, Matt. One of the questions comes in from Tina around, once the vendor has submitted their information in PaymentWorks, what is the turnaround time for them to be entered into Munis?

Matt McDonald (00:47:08):

It’s very quick. It’s usually within 48 hours we have them into Munis. We have an ongoing review process of this going on. The connection process between Munis and this is not long. The information addition is not difficult. So I have two people assigned to it. My primary is the account tech, backed up by the accountant just in case there’s any overflow. They’re usually able to enter in a vendor into Munis with this information within a couple of minutes, get them approved, and then done. There is no workflow in Munis anymore, so once the workflow is done in PaymentWorks, the approval process is done. It’s just data entry, and the connection process is a simple download so it doesn’t take long.

Emily Libby (00:47:48):

Perfect, that’s great. Sorry to backtrack, but thank you, anonymous, for asking about the two account clerks that you had. The question is just, were the two account clerks … Sorry, account clerks, just doing vendor onboarding prior to your reallocating their roles?

Matt McDonald (00:48:04):

I would love if I could do something like that. No, they were responsible for the approval of all. So essentially we have a layered approval process, so from zero on up, everything gets approved by our account clerks who are reviewing the documentation on every AP to make sure that they have invoices attached, it matches, the address matches, and so on and so forth. And then if it’s over $50,000, we have an additional review and so on and so forth. But they did that, plus they also did vendor onboarding. However, at the time, the additional work was done by the department. So the account clerks at department level, who we are not directly in charge of, they are responsible for the entry of it. So they had to do … To gain the information, they had to get the W-9s. They had to attach it into Munis. They had to get it all together, and then they had to put it in through workflow.

(00:48:51):

I found that when it comes to the rejection percentage of things from departments submitted to finance department, the vendor onboarding process probably had the highest level of rejection in terms of making sure that the information was correct from the vendor. It was often just incomplete, and most of it had to do with overworked clerks who just were having trouble getting the vendors to give them stuff.

Emily Libby (00:49:12):

Exactly. So prior to PaymentWorks, there was just a lot of incomplete, inaccurate, missing information.

Matt McDonald (00:49:17):

It was, we had to go back and forth a lot. You know, the project managers are always pushing to get things done quickly. That’s their role. We are always trying to get them done completely. That is our role, and then somewhere in the middle we find a happy space. This PaymentWorks has kind of eliminated a lot of that for us.

Emily Libby (00:49:33):

Awesome, thank you. Question from anonymous; do you do TIN matching in the IRS website? Do you do bulk TIN matching at the end of the year?

Matt McDonald (00:49:42):

It all happens in PaymentWorks. I don’t do any of that.

Emily Libby (00:49:44):

It’s automated.

Matt McDonald (00:49:44):

Whether we did it before? Yeah, it’s automated now. Did we do TIN matching? We tried. We would do our best.

Emily Libby (00:49:50):

[inaudible 00:49:52]

Matt McDonald (00:49:52):

We couldn’t always. I would say if the 1099s weren’t rejected then we were probably fine. But yeah, we would check with the IRS when we could but it was not … I cannot say that all 3,000 vendors had had that done, and I don’t know what happened prior to me being there. I would guess inconsistently yes, or no. But now it’s all automated, so I don’t have to worry about it.

Emily Libby (00:50:16):

Excellent. And then question from Joyce around validating information in PaymentWorks to the W-9 and business licenses. Is the vendor sending you a W-9 via email or through PaymentWorks?

Matt McDonald (00:50:26):

A W-9 is attached in PaymentWorks. The business license is a separate process, but the W-9 is attached in PaymentWorks, and it’s a simple visual. We just take a look, say, “Yeah, that matches. Great, done.”

Emily Libby (00:50:38):

It’s generated electronically most of the time, right? Your payees choose?

Matt McDonald (00:50:41):

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. It’s generated electronically. It’s all taken care of that way, so it’s going to be right. And a lot of our checking over of it has just been just, we like to make sure that it was working, and that it’s matching here, and it also matches what we have in Munis. Because there are times when we have existing vendors who are putting it in, and we’re finding the information that we get in PaymentWorks is different because maybe Munis was outdated and the vendor never updated the information and now we have it. So we do checks that way, but that’s how it’s done. It’s all generated in PaymentWorks, so it’s easier. Also, I can read everything on it because it’s not handwritten anymore.

Emily Libby (00:51:12):

Perfect, and it’s validated through the IRS so-

Matt McDonald (00:51:15):

Validated through the IRS and all that stuff.

Emily Libby (00:51:20):

Question from Lind around the Munis workflow. How were or are you using it? Does it sync with PaymentWorks, if at all?

Matt McDonald (00:51:28):

Munis workflow, in terms of vendor onboarding, is no longer necessary. One of the things I’ve been able to do that I thought was important was, I’ve actually turned access off in Munis for departments to make changes to vendors. They can no longer … They can access and see the vendors. They can look at the paperwork, but they cannot change anything. Of course, we do it all in finance now, and all of it is done through PaymentWorks. So the workflow used to be done at the department level. From the department level, it flowed to the finance department, which would do the approval or rejection and it would flow either back to the department or then be entered into … Or then confirmed or approved in Munis at that point.

(00:52:06):

That’s how we used to do it. Now, Munis is really just … We just enter the information in there. We do not worry about the approval process at that point. The only error would be if there were typos and things within Munis, but the risk is very, very low and I don’t feel it’s necessary for us to do that level of double-check, particularly as we’re doing everything through PaymentWorks in the payments anyway, so the information will be as accurate as the vendors make it.

Emily Libby (00:52:32):

Perfect. Thank you so much. And from Linda, how many other companies did you look at, and why did you ultimately pick PaymentWorks over the others?

Matt McDonald (00:52:40):

Well, I couldn’t give you the number of them. Obviously, we went through our regular competitive bidding process. But to be honest, we had to go through a sole source memo with this one, primarily because there were aspects of this … You know, the primary people that are going to be the ones who are going to provide this protection is the banks. The level of check that a … The level of security that a bank offers in terms of what they’re looking at from a vendor and what they’re looking at on the account really is not great. It’s really more just, “Is this an active account or is it not an active account? If it is, great. If not, no.”

(00:53:10):

Where PaymentWorks, and Em, you’re going to have to back me up on some of this stuff … They do a deeper dive into it, making sure that the address matches, making sure that the TIN matches, making sure that the … So they’re asking, one, “Is this an active account?” And two, “Is this the active account for the vendor? Is this the right account? Should this be the account to use?” And once we get the okay to pay, which is just something that goes through as part of the approval process, we can have faith that that account is correct, and we can put it through that way. Munis doesn’t have a role. It doesn’t have to play a role in that at all.

Emily Libby (00:53:45):

Perfect. Yeah, other than being your vendor data house.

Matt McDonald (00:53:48):

It’s the vendor data storage, but when it comes to the checking process … So when it comes to … We talked to our bank. We talked to our risk management. We talked to some other companies, but I couldn’t find anybody that offered this particular service this way, and I certainly couldn’t find anybody who was willing to give me a two million dollar insurance policy as just part of the agreement.

Emily Libby (00:54:10):

Thank you. Yeah, and we can send our sole source letter out with this as well. And Diane was curious too about, just how are you notified from PaymentWorks that a vendor’s information is either valid or invalid? And I’ll just throw out there, for anyone that’s interested in a demo, we would love to set that up with you so you can actually see what it looks like in real time. Matt was just describing the vendor registers. We do our validations. His team gets to see what’s validated. And then if something is invalid, we typically let the vendor know. But Matt, I don’t know if you want to just share anything else about being notified about payment.

Matt McDonald (00:54:47):

Well, you know there is … We get notifications if there’s problems. But primarily, we just do a check. Go in there, and you go to vendor onboarding process. You look at the … There’s a tracker in there, and it’s just a simple thing. It’s like, “Okay, here’s your vendor, and here are like the six dots that have to be approved.” You can go into any one and see where the problem is. So I had a vendor the other day, the problem was their TIN didn’t match. And when I looked and I checked the W-9 I saw that, “Oh, they had changed an eight to a five.” So they just had to do a retype, and it was easy. But I could see specifically what the vendor missed so I could reach out to them and let them know, “Hey, this is the error.” But the vendor can also see it, so they can look and they get notified as well.

(00:55:28):

It’s a real simple process. But for a lot of it, it really puts the vendors in control of the process up to a certain point. So if there are errors that are rejected, they can go in and see what they did wrong and make changes to it, as can we, and make changes to it. I don’t get a tremendous number of rejections, for the most part, vendors enter it incorrectly. The biggest delay always is just either … Is just getting the vendors to fill out the information. Sometimes they delay on that one, but that’s … All of that is on them. We’ll send out … They get automatic reminders from PaymentWorks, so I don’t even really have to worry about that. If the departments then have a sense of urgency, they’ll often call the vendor who then goes, “Oh yeah, sorry,” and they’ll take care of it.

Emily Libby (00:56:07):

Perfect, and you definitely have that visibility in PaymentWorks. Which if anyone would like to see a demo, we can show you the onboarding tracker; super cool. You can see time stamps where vendors are. We have reporting around bottlenecks, help you with your KPIs. It’s pretty incredible. Matt, I’ll keep you for just a couple minutes longer. Thank you so much, and thank you everyone who’s interested in firing away these questions. Just wanted to know if you have an idea or a ballpark of how many invoices you process a month?

Matt McDonald (00:56:37):

Oh, I’ve had that information. I’ve been on vacation for the last week, so I’ve deleted every ounce of information involved with the city. But we probably do between 150 and 210 checks per week, so that many.

Emily Libby (00:56:51):

Cool.

Matt McDonald (00:56:51):

So times four, 800, it can be. Some months more, some months less, but I’d say 800 to 1,000 is probably what we’re doing.

Emily Libby (00:56:59):

Awesome. Thanks, Matt. All righty, one other question around the implementation and the five allowed logins for PaymentWorks. I think that’s actually coming from the implementation guide, where we have five members allowed to be part of the PaymentWorks Academy. I do just want to clarify that logins for PaymentWorks through single sign-on, SSO, you have unlimited, right? So Matt, you have all departments being able to log in to PaymentWorks to initiate vendor invites, right?

Matt McDonald (00:57:28):

We have. Essentially, we talked to the departments and we said, “Okay, there’s two different roles that we’re going to utilize for you. One is going to be initiator, which everybody has.” They’re going to be the only ones who send the email. They can log in. We have single sign in, so we worked with our IT department to get that set up, so it’s real easy to get in. And then the second role is the procurement role, and all they do is when an invitation goes out, they take a look at the invitation and make sure it is what they want, and then they hit yes, and then it goes out. From that point on, the other roles are all assigned to finance.

Emily Libby (00:58:02):

Perfect, okay. So yeah, Joyce, I just wanted to clarify that five is for the PaymentWorks Academy, for your typically finance vendor approver staff to go through our quizzes, that Matt said, you know?

Matt McDonald (00:58:14):

Yeah, yeah, yes.

Emily Libby (00:58:15):

The training, and then the other … The users in the other departments, as Matt mentioned, your departments log in to PaymentWorks through single sign-on. You can have unlimited department users, and we can set up different roles and permissions. So Matt, for example, procurement might be able to do a little bit more than what a base role and initiator can do. And you said that you are one of the only ones with permissions to see ACH, whereas other departments like initiators cannot see ACH, or cannot see Social Security numbers anymore.

Matt McDonald (00:58:45):

No, all they see is the tokenized versions of these, so that they know they’ve been filled out. That’s it. They can see a check mark whether it’s right or wrong, but they can’t see the real number.

Emily Libby (00:58:53):

Excellent, and then Joyce, just to finish up, yes, the vendor registered in PaymentWorks, sets up their username and password. We are built as a network, so if the vendor is already on PaymentWorks doing business with … Since Matt’s at Vista, we have UCSD, UCSD Health on the platform. If a vendor already exists, they just log back in with username and password. Their W-9 and address and corporate information is already filled out. They just have a couple more questions to go, so easy adoption. Dang, we crushed it. Matt, thank you so much. I think I was able to answer most peoples’ questions. I am so sorry if I didn’t. You all had such great questions. I know Jacob, you did have one around sending payment files from PaymentWorks back to the ERP, but I’m not entirely sure I am clear on that question because the payment file flow … Oh, go ahead, Matt.

Matt McDonald (00:59:50):

Well, I was just going to say, Jacob, if you have questions about kind of like our process of the day-to-day running of these things and how you get the payment processing back and forth, feel free to send … And this is to anybody. You’ve got my email address right there. Send me a quick email. Some of these things I’ll know, because I was obviously in charge of the implementation of it. Some of these things the accountant or senior accountant, the people who are doing the day-to-day work on these, can probably answer better than I can. But I can get you information. It’s not a big deal. I’m happy to send it over to you.

Emily Libby (01:00:18):

Perfect. All righty, well, let’s do that, then. You have my information. You have Matt’s information. Feel free to email us with any questions. Also, if you’d like to see more of a deep-dive demo we’d be happy to set that up with your representative. And again, we just really appreciate your time, your effort, your exploring what’s out there to protect your companies and cities and government, so thank you all so much for your time and energy. We know it’s not easy. And thank you, Matt, very, very much for your time as well today.

Matt McDonald (01:00:49):

Happy to help out. Thank you.

Emily Libby (01:00:50):

All right. Bye, all.

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