Headquarters: California
Employees: 1,000+
Industry: Education
Monthly invoice volume: 1,500+
Higher Ground is a hyper-scaling, tech-enabled global school operator whose mission is to modernize and mainstream the international Montessori movement. As a global provider of Montessori-informed education and teacher training, Higher Ground’s Guidepost Montessori network is the world’s largest network of Montessori schools, with 100 school campuses across the U.S. and Asia with at-home and virtual learning programs serving more than 7,000 families worldwide.
The challenge
As a technology-driven school operator with diverse stakeholders across geographies, Higher Ground saw an opportunity to digitally transform its operations and improve its accounts payable (AP) process. They were using disparate AP tools across the organization that were not integrated with Sage Intacct, the ERP system they used for approvals, limiting the organization’s ability to benefit from improved efficiencies.
Higher Ground also has a complex invoice approval process with people involved from all 100 campuses, which includes administrators both on the operational side and at school sites around the world, consisting of multiple approvers and time-consuming email correspondence. Opening more campuses adds even more complexity to their approval process. They were at their breaking point in terms of time and cost. If they could save on invoice processing, they could more easily fund more valuable learning programs for children across the globe.
"Our complicated invoice approvals process was impeding everyone involved, from the administrators at our schools to the AP clerks at our headquarters. Routing approvals is now an easy process. Our AP team is no longer struggling to get invoices approved on time and leadership loves being able to compare previous bills on the go with the mobile app.” - Rachel Knapp, VP, Financial & Accounting Systems
The solution
As a forward-thinking organization, Higher Ground sought an intelligent, automated solution to provide oversight and uniformity across their finance operation and free its administrators from manually intensive processing and approvals. Today, Vic.ai is providing Higher Ground with a centralized end-to end solution for their AP team to delegate a majority of the invoice processing to AI and to simplify the approval process.
The results
"The AP team loves it,” says Margareta Marro, Director of Accounting Operations with Higher Ground. “It really helps them to become reviewers instead of processors [of data entry]." And all that success is supported by Vic.ai’s customer team, who support Higher Ground through onboarding and beyond.
"I've been blown away by the customer service,” says Rachel Knapp, Vice President of Financial & Accounting Systems with Higher Ground. "You get a very quick response, and the caliber of the support staff is fantastic - you can tell that they understand the issue well."
From employee morale to increased productivity directly impacting their bottom line, Higher Ground has clearly experienced a quick and significant ROI with Vic.ai.
.png)
.svg)
