Highlands Country Club

Background

Highlands Country Club, located in the North Carolina mountains, is known for its beautiful scenery and genuine southern hospitality. The Club has a reputation for being family-friendly with excellent customer service from their attentive staff.

The Club was founded in 1928, and its course was designed by Scottish architect Donald Ross. The Club is best known for being the practice ground for 1930 Grand Slam winner, Bobby Jones.

Debbie Brock has been the Controller and CFO at Highlands Country Club for just over six years. She heads an accounting team of three people, one of whom is there for only nine months out of the year.

Challenge

Traditionally, the Club paid its vendors by check. So when the high season picked up, things bogged down for the small accounting department. Their part-time employee worked a full 40 hours and even overtime to keep up with accounting tasks.

The manual process proved to be difficult for the team. But when Covid-19 hit, the Club was faced with an additional challenge that it had not foreseen. The accounting staff had to find another way to make and receive payments while they were only able to spend a limited time in the office.

In addition, the Club experienced several incidents with the US Postal Service. They made payments to three vendors that were fraudulently cashed. Later, newspaper articles reported that the postal employees were found to be stealing checks.

Luckily, Highlands’ vendors were understanding when a payment occasionally arrived several months late. The vendors knew that Highlands always paid on time and that the problem was due to the USPS. However, slow delivery by USPS also caused issues for the Club’s members with their payments being delivered to the Club weeks after they were sent.

Although the accounting team was comfortable with their paper-driven process, Debbie knew it was time to move to a digital system.

Solution

Debbie learned about Edenred Pay’s virtual card payments while looking into a new vendor system. As a vendor that accepted payments through Edenred Pay, they were eager to recommend Edenred Pay’s integrated solution to Debbie to help automate Highlands’ payment process. She had also heard from other Clubs who’d had positive experiences with Edenred Pay.

After much consideration, Debbie chose to incorporate virtual cards into Highlands’ payment process. Debbie said, “The transition from paper to digital was a paradigm shift for my team.” So she spent a lot of time going over the fine print before making a decision.

Debbie did not want to have another fraud incident and had to be sure that her company’s financial information would not be at risk. However, something she saw in the fine print of the paperwork convinced her that Edenred Pay was a safe solution.

Edenred Pay’s annual voluntary System and Organization Controls (SOC) audits by a third party ensure that their operational systems and levels of security, confidentiality, and privacy meet compliance standards. “Because your company gets audited for its IT security practices, that helped me feel more comfortable. I’m making sure that everything is secure on my end and Edenred Pay is taking steps to make everything secure too.”

Highlands Country Club set up virtual card payments with Edenred Pay. They no longer worry about checks being lost or stolen with their automated payments.

Results

The Highlands Country Club first automated their payments with Edenred Pay about a year ago. Debbie noted, “The entire experience with Edenred Pay has been positive. Everyone has been very kind and patient with me, even though I was slow and careful to decide.”

The implementation and training also went well. Although her team was used to paper payment processes, Debbie described training as, “quick and easy.”  She was also happy that Edenred Pay made the information easy to reconcile.

Highland’s small accounting team is enjoying the smooth process of virtual card payments and noted that their vendors are happy with getting paid faster. And the team does not have to be in the office to process payments.

Debbie said the Club is saving on postage and receiving an additional $300 a month so far from the payments that they’ve automated with Edenred Pay. “We just need to use Edenred Pay in more ways.” Debbie is planning to move some of the Club’s other payments into ACH and eventually incorporate Edenred Pay’s invoicing services.

Conclusion

Overall, Highlands is looking forward to expanding its relationship with Edenred Pay. They expect to see an even greater rebate once they have more vendors being paid by virtual card with the help of the vendor enrollment team.

Debbie’s message to Clubs wanting to automate their payment process is to consider Edenred Pay. “They have a good platform that is easy to learn and use. And everyone I’ve spoken to has been kind and helpful.”