Blue Water Development Corporation is a hospitality management company that manages campgrounds and hotels across the U.S. Blue Water doesn’t grow in small steps, it grows in leaps. What began as a hospitality management company overseeing 7 of their own properties quickly expanded into a nationwide portfolio of 69 campgrounds and hotels. With that growth came a surge in invoice volume, rising from less than 750 per month to over 4,000 invoices a month.
Before Yooz, approvals couldn’t keep up with the pace.
Invoices were emailed to individuals, shuffled between desks, and tracked with little more than memory and persistence. Kristen Gerhart, Blue Water’s Treasurer, described the biggest bottleneck bluntly: “There was little transparency in the turnaround times, approval status, and where the invoices were stalled within the process.” If an approver was out of office, invoices could sit untouched in what the team called “nowhere land.” Vendors were often the first to surface the issue, prompting that dreaded internal scramble: “I have no idea. I’ve never seen that.”
Blue Water needed more than basic routing.
They needed workflows that matched real-life complexity across management entities, ownership entities, and property-level approvals. They evaluated other options, but hesitated because the solutions couldn’t support the dynamic workflows they required. Yooz stood out as the only solution that could accommodate their many scenarios and keep evolving with them. As Gerhart put it: “Yooz was the only company that was able to handle everything that we were looking for. … Everything we’ve thrown at it so far, you guys can do.”
As Blue Water grew, Yooz became woven into the fabric of daily operations.
Executives, department heads, and property general managers all play a role in approvals through standardized, unified workflows. Eventually, Blue Water outgrew QuickBooks and moved to Sage Intacct and Yooz moved with them and “plugged right into Intacct… no pain.” That stability mattered, especially as audit requirements increased when the company began managing properties owned by publicly traded organizations. Gerhart emphasized that thanks to the attachments feature and the sync of data into Intacct they have visibility into the document history they need, “that audit trail is key.”
Today, Yooz is no longer just “a tool AP uses.” It’s infrastructure. It’s the system that keeps a 69-property portfolio moving, ensures compliance, and supports the company’s relentless pace of expansion. As the next step, Blue Water plans to bring YoozPay online to streamline payments and eliminate unnecessary back-and-forth between systems during payment approvals. Yooz has become the AP engine powering their growth and the foundation for everything on the horizon.