How Bickford Senior Living Boosted Rent Collection Above Pre-covid Levels

Of all the challenges that COVID-19 brought Bickford Senior Living, the one that confounded them was the slowdown in rent payment.

Before the pandemic, about 90-92% of residents at the Olathe, Kansas-based Bickford paid their rent by the 10th of the month. During the pandemic, that number dropped to 79%.

“It’s a mystery to us why the families since COVID paid later,” says Bickford president Mike Eby. “Whether they’re more tight with their funds or something else, we’re just not sure. We don’t know why it happened.”

What Eby and the team do know is the impact of those delayed payments.

“It caused us to be later with our vendors,” he says. “It caused cash flow issues around payroll time at the end of the month. And if we had property taxes due, that took a big chunk of cash to pay. That’s what was impacted from the slower payments.”

That’s when Bickford connected with Sunbound and learned the power of accounts receivable (AR) automation. Using its automated financial technology platform with rent collection support, built exclusively for senior care, Sunbound helped Bickford get prompt payments above pre-COVID levels, up to about 95% by late this year.

From March to October of 2024, Bickford rolled the system out across its entire portfolio, providing a flexible payment experience for families, maximizing revenue and decreasing billing errors. Here is a look at why Bickford Senior Living is so happy.

Bickford has seen a 94% resident adoption to digital payments

As operator struggles stacked up industry-wide during the pandemic, Bickford was among the operators that Sunbound found. But Sunbound is not Bickford’s first attempt at converting rent payments from physical checks to digital.

“When we tried to roll out our previous portal, we had some success, but it was maybe less than half of our people going with the portal versus issuing a manual check,” Eby says. “I was very skeptical that Sunbound would be able to get adoption north of 50%.”

Not only did Sunbound deliver on that promise, they far over-delivered.

“They’ve gotten adoption up to 94%,” he says. “I think the biggest benefit is that it’s a much easier process for our families to pay. Before we were using a bank’s portal and it was cumbersome. Sunbound’s portal is very easy to navigate. Very quick. It has really improved the customer satisfaction with this area. We’re trying to make it easier to do business with us.”

Improved experience for family and staff, with reduced staff work about 20 hours a month

Even before the payments reached that 95% mark, Bickford was seeing benefits from its Sunbound partnership within just a few months of connecting. Those include three interconnected wins:

• Reducing family disagreements over billing
• Improved billing accuracy
• Materially improved family experience

“There were disputes happening with bills where the family would call into the director and just kind of continue to increase,” Eby says. “If there’s a dispute, Sunbound tries to resolve it first with the family and alerts it to the building and us so we know that these are getting addressed if there are disputes. That has helped tremendously reduce our bad debt load because if a resident doesn’t pay for a while, that balance gets pretty big.”

All of these moves reduce bad debt, and generally make it easier for people to do business with Bickford.

“Our families have said that they have been very pleased with this new rollout we’ve done,” he says. “We still get the odd checks here and there but by and large it’s mostly electronic.”

Staff members are too.

“It’s reduced the amount of time it’s taken our staff to manage accounts receivable and payment processing,” Eby says. “It’s probably reduced it for each director by up to twenty hours a month. So it has freed them up to spend more time with residents instead of administrative details.”

Sunbound is “another arm of our company”

What Bickford has seen is that Sunbound’s team supports the financial operations of each community. This is not just software that is implemented; Sunbound’s support team assists residents and families each day, which allows community teams to focus on other value-add work.

“The follow-up with checks that have bounced or funds that have come back insufficient funds have been really positive,” Eby says. “Their staff has been really good to work with. They’re all very capable. And really function as another arm of our company.”

Moving into 2025, Eby has plenty to worry about and manage. That’s the life of a senior living operator. What he’s not worried about is rent.

“Their rent roll advance financing program has been very helpful to bridge those short-term month-in shortfalls that we experience,” he says. “I can’t say it enough: they just have done what they promised they would do, and that still today kind of amazes me. They’re the real deal.”

This article is sponsored by Sunbound Homes. To learn more, visit sunboundhomes.com.

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