The Lodge at Sonoma Resort Closes Sales in Less Than a Day with Sertifi

Opportunity

With over 180 rooms and 14,000 square feet of meeting space, the team at The Lodge at Sonoma Resort was eager to bring greater efficiency to their contracting and payment processes. The property was also interested in finding a PCI-compliant solution that would capture payments more securely and with lower fraud risk.

Originally, staff collected payment information for event deposits via Sertifi’s authorization solution. The authorization forms were then manually entered by the accounting team to receive payment, taking up to two weeks to fully reconcile an event payment.

Since the property sales team was already seeing greater speed and convenience with Sertifi’s e-signature solution, rolling out Sertifi’s payment functionality was an easy decision.

The Sertifi Solution

By implementing Sertifi’s full suite of sales solutions, the property was able to:

✅ Maximize efficiency across teams.

By digitizing overly manual tasks and streamlining contracts and payments into one system, it’s much easier for sales and finance teams to stay on track. Deposits are now scheduled out, are submitted faster, and are easier to reconcile and refund if necessary. There's also less room for human error and mishandling of payment information since it’s fully managed electronically.

It’s also much easier for every department to stay informed with the information they need. For example, the necessary parties are automatically notified via email whenever signed contracts, completed authorization forms, and payment information are submitted.

Plus, with simple processes and a user-friendly UI, staff were able to onboard quickly.

“Signing is quick and easy, and the payment process is really streamlined. We save a lot of time with the automatic schedules, instant receipt sharing with all necessary stakeholders, and an easier refund process,” said Liz Perez, group sales manager. “There’s also better communication between our sales and finance teams, which means we can close revenue much faster.”

✅ Simplify steps for clients.

Clients now get simple, all-in-one requests from the sales team and can sign their contract and submit their payment at the same time. Plus, everything is taken care of in an online portal, making it easy to respond from anywhere. Clients receive automated reminders to stay on schedule, as well as copies of the signed contract and receipts to their email.

With a more convenient process, turnarounds often take less than a day.

✅ Lower risk for delays and chargebacks on payments.

In addition to offering card payments, clients can also pay by ACH (eCheck). For both card and ACH payments, Sertifi’s online form is convenient to access and secure to use. ACH also helps the property offset the cost of credit card fees, as ACH fees are significantly lower.

With the growing threat of fraud, the property’s also happy to have a more secure, defensible method to handling event payments. It’s also easier to meet chargeback prevention best practices, such as tying a payment to a signature document.