Dorado Property Strengthens Payments Security

Overview

Dorado Property is a Perth-based investment house, with a presence in both Sydney and Brisbane. Since its inception in 2009, Dorado Property has established a strong reputation as trusted strategic investors and financiers to the Australian commercial property sector.

At the heart of Dorado Property’s success, is its reputation. As a non-bank lender, Dorado Property is committed to providing flexible and secure service offerings to both investors and property developers. This includes ensuring that all payments to commercial partners are processed in an accurate and expeditious manner.

In its quest to deliver on this commitment, Dorado Property regularly looks to integrate the latest technologies that help enhance its internal processes, drive greater efficiencies, and give it a competitive edge.

By integrating Eftsure into its accounting processes, Dorado Property was able to meet the expectations of its existing commercial partners, whilst also positioning itself favourably for future business expansion.

Challenge

When it comes to financing developments in Australia’s competitive commercial property sector, non-bank lenders, such as Dorado Property, play a critical role connecting investors with developers. One thing that sets non-bank lenders apart is their ability to meet commercial partners’ unique requirements by providing customised services, which include expeditious transfer of funds.

As such, any delays in funds transfers could impact its operations by delaying building projects.

Property developers trust Dorado Property to ensure that they’ll be able to access critical funds when required, as well as ensuring contractors, sub-contractors and suppliers are remunerated accurately for works undertaken on building sites.

At the same time, investors trust Dorado Property to manage their funds prudently and investors have a reasonable expectation that processing funds to them will be carried out in accordance with industry best-practices.

Thus, managing payments optimally is a core priority for Dorado Property.

Whilst many smaller investment houses rely on manual processes to manage payments, an organisation such as Dorado Property, that is experiencing significant growth, needs to embrace automation to ensure it has the capacity to maintain accurate and efficient payment processes as it expands. By embracing automation in its accounting processes, Dorado Property can confidently grow the number of investors on its books, as well as the number of development projects it funds at any one time, without compromising its payments efficiency or security.

With Dorado Property experiencing significant expansion over recent years, its management team has committed to investing in the technologies and systems that will enable its growth trajectory to escalate. With more investors coming on board, and more development projects being financed, Dorado Property’s management understands the importance of embracing the latest technologies that ensure its accounting team are equipped to handle the projected increased workloads.

Approach

Like many organisations, Dorado Property previously relied on manual controls to secure its outgoing payments. Whilst those manual controls had been effective, with no instances of incorrect or fraudulent payments, there was a realisation that as it grew and expanded, a more efficient and automated approach would be necessary.

Dorado Property sits at the confluence of payments heading in two directions. Firstly, as the recipient of investor funds, it needs to ensure these are efficiently and accurately paid out to developers, in the form of loans, as well as making direct payments to contractors/sub-contractors/suppliers for work undertaken on building projects. Secondly, as loans mature, Dorado Property processes principal plus interest payments back to investors.

Ensuring that both types of payments are processed accurately is critical for ensuring that development projects proceed as required, and that investors receive the correct funds owed to them in a timely manner.

As the organisation grew, manually managing both types of payments across multiple development projects was proving to be increasingly time-consuming and utilising the limited resources of its accounting team.

Additionally, with increased volumes of payments, there was a potential risk that errors could occur, or that payment data could be manipulated by malicious actors.

As the organisation pursued its expansion plans, the management team agreed that a new approach was needed to ensure its payment processes would be fit-for-purpose.

Result

To help it achieve its objectives, Dorado Property turned to Eftsure.

By integrating Eftsure into its accounting processes, Dorado Property has successfully gained confidence that it can carry out its core payments functions accurately and efficiently, giving it the ability to focus on growing its business.

The organisation is no longer reliant on their busy accounting staff to manually check every individual payment before processing.

Whilst the accounting team still carefully verifies payment details of investors, borrowers, and contractors/sub-contractors/suppliers prior to entering banking details into its CRM systems, Eftsure provides a critical layer of assurance that all the information is accurate, both at the time the data is input into the system, as well as at the time that a payment is processed.

With Eftsure’s approach to continuous compliance, Dorado Property gains the ability to verify payment details immediately prior to processing a payment. This is critical as protracted periods may lapse between the time payee banking details are entered into the CRM system and the time when an actual payment is processed.

Thanks to having Eftsure sitting on top of its accounting processes, Dorado Property no longer needs to conduct manual spot-checks on payments, because Eftsure facilitates the automated checking of all payments, thereby allowing the organisation to significantly strengthen its security controls.

Having Eftsure helps ensure that data has not been entered incorrectly, nor been manipulated between the time when the banking details were input into the systems and the time when a payment was processed.