Vacasa

As North America’s leading vacation rental partner, Vacasa offers full-service rental management and support for approximately 40,000 vacation homes in some of North America’s most sought-after destinations. With a vast number of properties under management, the organization needed better visibility into spend and improved procurement controls and processes in order to make purchasing easy and support quick approvals and delivery for buyers. The company’s evolving relationship with Amazon Business, and adoption of features like Pay by Invoice, has helped Vacasa consolidate accounts, improve approval workflows, and establish organization-wide purchasing controls — driving significant cost and time savings.

Optimizing procurement setup with account consolidation and invoicing

In 2022, Vacasa began exploring consolidating accounts with the goal of improving purchasing controls and increasing spend visibility. Buyers were using personal and company credit cards to make purchases on Amazon Business, making approvals and reconciliation manual and time-consuming. Vacasa needed to establish organizational policies that would provide the visibility they needed while updating organization procedures to facilitate reconciliation and tracking processes.

“We began improving visibility by streamlining processes and centralizing accounts — channeling BU spend through a single Amazon Business account and eliminating the use of personal credit cards,” says Vacasa Head of Global Source to Pay Joseph Strumolo. “And by establishing policies that give us better visibility into purchases, we’re also able to take advantage of discounts and consolidate spending so that we can hit our targets."

Reducing spend with improved visibility

Integrating Amazon Business with the Coupa purchasing platform, the organization partnered with Amazon Business support and their customer advisor to implement best practices — an effort that has enabled them to establish Groups, limitations, and purchasing restrictions within Punchout. Using Punchout, organizations can access Amazon Business while complying with their procurement policies and controls.

Vacasa established processes and policies to ensure that the majority of spend occurs within Punchout and Pay by Invoice. And they segmented other Groups to create limited categories, like IT, where they only want a finite number of buyers to have purchasing access. As a result, the team is better able to monitor purchases while gaining valuable insight into buyer behaviors and needs across locations — whether seasonal or location-specific.

Implementing business purchasing policies and payments controls

One example of how the team is driving cost savings by implementing new policies, is by funneling all purchasing through one centralized payment option. Their travel and expense team had around $2 million in annual spend on credit cards that were being reimbursed. “We took decisive action — turning off the ability for any users to leverage a company credit card at all,” says Strumolo. “If a buyer is using a credit card, it will decline. Instead, we force those purchases through Punchout so that we can take advantage of discounts, Pay by Invoice net terms, and get credit toward our Amazon Business rebates. This policy, new controls, and the use of Pay by Invoice also ensure that buyers are getting approvals before spend occurs.”

As they sought to manage spend, the team also implemented policies around the reimbursement of personal credit cards. 

Saving time and money with Amazon Business

While Vacasa has seen clear cost savings with Amazon Business by establishing purchasing controls and refining processes and policies, what time savings have they achieved? As a testament to their relationship with Amazon Business and the trust they’ve built, Vacasa switched from 3-Way-Match to 2-Way-Match, which compares invoices with their corresponding purchase orders (POs) before invoices are approved and paid. When items are shipped and charged, the team remits payment. And in the rare cases where an item doesn’t arrive, the invoice is backed out or credited. “Switching from 3-Way Match to 2-Way Match has accelerated on-time payments as well as the experience for our buyers,” Strumolo notes. “We’ve saved over 1,300 organizational hours as a result.”

As Vacasa continues to grow their partnership with Amazon Business — optimizing their processes and using their increased visibility to identify cost savings opportunities, they credit the improvements they have implemented over the past 2 1/2 years to their access to centralized support. “By consolidating into one Business Prime account through a single point-of-contact, our customer advisor, we’ve been able to kick off with the appropriate teams and get the support we need quickly,” says Strumolo.

As a result, the team has accelerated improvements to their procurement processes and gained deeper visibility into their purchasing trends to drive increasingly smart business buying across the company.