Accounts payable automation in property management traces back to a single dinner in late 1999. Mike Praeger had just sold a software company when Charlotte property owner Daniel Levine described how hard it was to get vendors paid on time and how much paper stood in the way. Praeger went looking for software he could recommend, found nothing, and started AvidXchange instead. In this episode of Beyond Rent, he joins host Joe Easton to tell that story and everything that followed.

Praeger describes AvidXchange less as one 25-year-old company, and more as five companies stacked in five-year increments, each one defined by a pivot. Launching in the cloud back when the cloud was the single biggest obstacle to closing a sale. Adding the Avid Pay Network in 2010, after a CFO explained that 26 banks and seven accounting systems could never produce one clean bill-pay run. Then, deciding suppliers were customers too, which meant standing up separate teams, roadmaps, and products for both sides of every payment.

The back half focuses on AI in production rather than AI in theory. Praeger walks through the agents now logging into thousands of individual supplier portals to apply payments, work that used to take an army of people. He covers invoice capture, which has moved well past OCR into near-perfect reading, with coding recommendations drawn from years of history, and explains why he believes property management, long dismissed as a technology laggard, has exactly the right use cases to become an early leader in AI adoption.