Livermore Valley Performing Arts Center (Livermore Valley Arts) is a nonprofit performing arts organization in downtown Livermore, California, operating two locations including the Bankhead Theater and the Bothwell Arts Center. The Mission of Livermore Valley Arts is to offer a broad range of arts opportunities and experiences to engage, enrich, and inspire our diverse community.
At a performing arts organization, the show can’t wait.
Vendors, artists, facilities, marketing, and production all have expenses moving at different tempos. And for Livermore Valley Arts, the CFO doesn’t just oversee the numbers, she lives in them daily, because cash flow is everything in a nonprofit.
But the old AP reality looked less like a well-run production and more like backstage chaos: invoices arriving by mail, stamped, sorted into department boxes, coded by hand, and finally re-entered into the accounting system. For simple bills, it was annoying. For split invoices—like concession orders that needed to be tracked across categories—it became a spreadsheet-and-print marathon. And the worst part? Approvals depended on whether someone checked their physical inbox. Sometimes that meant days. Sometimes weeks.
Even after moving to AP automation years ago, the organization hit a new breaking point: costs spiked and support slipped, until the annual price increased 200% from one year to the next.
So, the CFO, Reanna Bradford, went looking for an alternative. Something familiar enough to adopt quickly, but modern enough to help them run AP with fewer bottlenecks.
The moment Yooz “clicked”
When they discovered Yooz, the reaction was immediate: “I swear my jaw was on the floor.”
They realized they weren’t just upgrading vendors, they were upgrading eras. “We were in the Stone Age, with our legacy AP automation vendor.”
The difference showed up in everyday work. Yooz’s AI OCR removed painful copy/paste routines, especially on invoices with long descriptions and multiple lines:
“I don’t know what I’d do without that now. You can just click and drag and it copies it for you.”
Making AP feel predictable again
With 11 departments, 10 approvers, and nearly 20 users, the organization needed AP to move without the finance team playing traffic cop. Yooz’s approval workflows became a standout, so much so that the CFO called it her favorite part: “It takes the guesswork out of where an invoice is supposed to go next.”
Invoices mostly arrive through a dedicated AP email inbox and are imported automatically, so the finance team doesn’t have to “think about it.” Departments handle the first-pass coding, and the CFO stays in control as the final approver before everything moves into Sage Intacct, keeping the ERP clean for budget accuracy and audit readiness.
“The approval workflow is probably my favorite part of Yooz, because it takes the guesswork out of where the invoice is supposed to go next. Yooz just takes care of it and I don’t have to think about it.” – Reanna Bradford, CFO
One place for the truth (and the “breadcrumbs”)
Then came an unexpected win: communication. Instead of hunting through email threads, chats, and attachments spread across systems, Yooz anchored invoice conversations directly to the document: “It all lives in one system. You’re not digging around asking “where did I talk about this invoice?””
The CFO calls it leaving “breadcrumbs”—a searchable trail of context, approvals, and decisions that becomes invaluable during month-end, audits, and vendor disputes.
And because Yooz ties documentation back to Sage Intacct, it’s not just an AP tool, it becomes part of the financial system of record: “If I go into the bill in Intacct, I can see all of it. Attachments, comments, and the audit trail all in one easy to access place. I don’t have to go back into a new system.”
“The attachments feature is huge because it is where backup documentation can be added to that invoice. It saves me time because I don’t have to go looking for the answers I need.”- Reanna Bradford, CFO
Payments that don’t wait for a signer
Finally, the organization tackled the last major friction point: payments. With YoozPay, vendors can get paid via virtual card, ACH, or check, and they receive email notifications when payments are released, reducing follow-ups and strengthening vendor relationships.
Most importantly, leadership can approve payments remotely. No more stacks of checks sitting on a desk waiting for signatures: “The ability to make those approvals remotely is huge.”
The outcome: AP that’s faster, clearer, and built for continuity
Today, invoices typically flow from capture to Intacct in about 2–3 days on average, often faster for common bills.
But the bigger transformation is operational confidence: fewer silos, more transparency, and a process that doesn’t break when someone is out, exactly what a nonprofit needs when time and money are always limited.
And for the CFO, one differentiator stands above the rest, especially after the experience that prompted the switch: “My biggest thing though with Yooz is customer service. I usually get a reply within 24 hours.”
Or as she put it: “I get all the big bells and whistles but then the customer service of a small company.”