Clean Up Your Casino’s Vendor Management: Reduce Costs, Mitigate Risk and Increase Vendor Relations

To run a casino properly and efficiently, the use of outside vendors is essential. For a typical casino, it’s not unusual to partner with hundreds of vendors, from gaming supplies to food and beverage.

Casino accounting staff process a significant volume of transactions each day. They do so while attempting to carry lean workforces. To complicate matters, many accounting processes in casinos have traditionally been done manually. For tasks like vendor management, relying on manual workflows is not only burdensome but also particularly risky and could easily present casinos with a variety of challenges. 

Duplicate Vendors

With a casino relying on hundreds of vendors, it’s imperative that vendor lists are up to date and accurate. Unfortunately, vendor lists are typically so large they are difficult to maintain manually.

The end result is duplicate vendors or even inactive vendors who are no longer partnering with the casino. Lists that contain duplicate or inactive vendors put casinos at greater risk for error and duplicate payment. 

For example, one employee could enter a vendor as “Company X,” but then an accounts payable employee may also go in to enter the vendor and do so as “The Company X.” It’s the same vendor, but it’s listed as two separate vendors in the casino’s records. When the casino goes to pay the invoice, it’s entirely possible for the casino to pay one invoice to “Company X” and then the same invoice to “The Company X” without vendor management controls in place.

Lack of Comprehensive Insight & Granular Visibility

Maintaining a list of hundreds of vendors is no small task. And with every vendor comes a checklist of required information needed by the casino to not only make payments on invoices but also keep a proper record for audits and tax purposes (e.g., W-9s and 1099s). 

Without a way to maintain visibility of this key vendor information, the ability of a casino to ensure it has received all required information from each vendor or to see whether a vendor is active or inactive is much more difficult. 

Greater Risk of Fraud

No accountability in vendor management also opens up casinos to greater risks of fraud and data integrity issues. Without proper vendor management controls, who or what is keeping track of making sure casinos are paying invoices to the right vendors? 

There’s a much greater chance for fraud to occur — and in a highly regulated environment, the consequences could be severe for a casino, such as minimum internal control compliance issues or penalties due to the results of an audit. 

CasinoEdge Intacct Simplifies Vendor Management

To address these significant challenges of vendor management, CasinoEdge, powered by Sage Intacct, leverages its casino-specific accounting software to streamline and simplify these processes in four big ways:

1. Better Organization

CasinoEdge Intacct allows casino accounting departments to create custom fields for their vendors and to simply check boxes when they have received key information documents like a W-9. This enables AP teams to easily monitor through list views whether they’ve received all of the proper information from a vendor. 

The ability to assign vendor types also empowers better organization and simplifies reporting should the casino need to pull vendors that are only associated with a certain category (e.g., gaming or food and beverage). This allows an easily accessible report to show the amount paid to gaming vendors for a given timeframe to adhere to internal control requirements. 

2. Avoiding Duplicate Payments

Duplicate vendors often results in duplicate payments. Within CasinoEdge Intacct, however, searching the vendor list becomes a simple task. Intacct list views are easily searchable to help ensure an entire search has been completed before adding new vendors.  

In addition to the vendor search, CasinoEdge Intacct implements specific controls that help casinos avoid duplicate payments. If a casino pays a specific invoice number to a vendor, rules are applied to disallow payments of the same invoice number for the same vendor more than once. 

By avoiding duplicate payments, casinos are better positioned to reduce unnecessary vendor management errors and eliminate non-value-added activities that often occur. 

3. Improved Visibility

Clean and current vendor lists are not only more accurate and easier to manage but also provide much greater visibility for the accounting department.

Specifically, CasinoEdge Intacct enables a clear system audit trail that shows any changes that were made in a vendor list and who made those changes. This type of audit trail is yet another component of enforcing a casino’s highly regulated environment.

AP departments also gain better visibility to see through and across the entirety of their vendor lists for financial insights, including P&L reports. The access and visibility to this information helps empower more efficient and informed decision making. 

4. Employee Payments

With CasinoEdge Intacct’s Employee Time and Expense module, casinos are able to separate employee payments from being processed through their vendor list. This reduction of intermingled payments eliminates the potential for fraud and missed employee reimbursements.

How Strong Is Your Vendor Management?

Implementing and maintaining strong vendor relations is paramount for casinos to receive high quality on-going service and favorable terms. The challenge of managing hundreds of vendors across many departments can often lead to errors and duplicate records if unchecked. A lack of strong vendor management controls through an automated process makes casinos more vulnerable to real risk and challenges like fraud and duplicate payments. 

The implementation of a casino-specific accounting system addresses both of these serious concerns and helps casinos maintain accurate vendor lists that better position the organization for greater efficiency, data integrity and quality vendor relations.

Wipfli has helped more than 40 casinos, ranging in all different sizes, implement CasinoEdge, which runs on Sage Intacct’s award-winning accounting and business management software. Want to see the solution in action? Contact us to learn more or schedule a live demo.