Government Investment Partners, LLC: Automating investor distributions to enable growth

The team at AppFolio Investment Manager has been partnering with GIP to help enable their meteoric growth, and GIP has seen tremendous success with the use of AppFolio Investment Manager’s Investor Payments service. Investor Payments is integrated within the AppFolio Investment Manager workflow and allows general partners to easily send, track, and manage their distribution payments electronically or via checks. The team at AppFolio Investment Manager recently sat down with Ralph Gilbertsen, SVP of Operations, and Diane Jones, Accounting Manager, at Government Investment Partners to hear more about their experience using Investor Payments.

Why did you initially partner with AppFolio Investment Manager?

Ralph Gilbertsen: We started searching for software that would provide a higher quality Investor Portal and reporting, visually, because we were unhappy with our existing software. We were initially just interested in the reporting and portal features, but as we got deeper into the investigation, we realized the different capabilities that were available.

Which features are you using within AppFolio?

Ralph Gilbertsen: So, we're utilizing the CRM, and we've recently started utilizing the fundraising capabilities. We're utilizing the distributions, record keeping, as well as the ACH direct payments as much as possible. So I think we're taking pretty full advantage of the current features that you have included in the system.

Tell us about your experience using Investor Payments.

Ralph Gilbertsen: Paying investors with ACH has been a lifesaver. We're sending out the ACHs and we're sending out emails to our investors now, rather than having to send manual letters, and that's been a huge savings. We do quarterly distributions, so that was one of the attractive features of AppFolio. 

Diane Jones: Regarding the payment process, it's been a great feature. It has simplified getting the distributions done. We were able to get the bank account and information set up in AppFolio, then we walked investors through the new process, letting them know that it was an option for the electronic payment versus a check payment. That worked really well. Now, I love using it, it's very easy to use. You can run certain reports to access information, which helps in processing the distributions. 

How has AppFolio Investment Manager changed the way GIP operates?

Ralph Gilbertsen: Previous to AppFolio, we'd been kind of managing our investor base on spreadsheets, along with doing our distributions with a combination of spreadsheets plus doing manual letters and matching up checks. So I've estimated that utilizing AppFolio has probably cut out 90% of our work. It's been a tremendous time saver for us. Plus, we're making full use of the CRM. We started in 2017 and we've grown over the last 18 months from basically six people to 18 people at this point. So we're undergoing some rapid growth and trying to implement systems to support that growth. And AppFolio has become a big part of it. We've kind of based our whole investor relations program, including distributions, off AppFolio.