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This blog post relates to Rockend, one of our previous brands. For more information please read the press release.
Owing to the nature of its product those in the real estate and property management sector have always found it easy to figure out what their clients are buying – but rarely have they known why.
Continue reading “5 ways to use neuromarketing in property management” →
If you handle property accounting for commercial real estate, particularly involving retail or office tenants, you’ve probably run across the challenge of managing real estate expense recoveries. These expenses don’t fit nicely into your well-organized GL, and they typically require manual tracking of complex reconciliations. So, what exactly are real estate recoveries, and what’s the best way to manage them?
Commercial real estate expense recoveries and retail recoveries refer to the shared expenses that a landlord passes on to its tenants, and subsequently recovers by generating an invoice to the tenant for their pro-rata share. Recoveries are also referred to as outgoings or Common Area Maintenance (CAM) charges. These shared expenses can include utilities, services, repairs, maintenance, property taxes, insurance and other additional expenses.
Tenant leases often include provisions that outline their responsibilities for paying a portion of shared property expenses. Net leases and gross leases take different approaches to this:
Without careful planning and separation of recoverable and non-recoverable items in your chart of accounts, the process of managing real estate recoveries will be complex. Property accountants should choose standardized codes and nomenclature to identify and group recoveries together. This can make the process easier, but exceptions and inconsistencies will occur — in some cases, one GL may be tied to more than one building, which makes it difficult to keep track of the expenses that are unique to each building.
MRI Commercial Management clients have access to retail recoveries tools that make it easier to calculate and process complex reconciliations. Let’s take a general look at the steps involved in billing for recoveries using MRI.
The recoveries process begins with calculating monthly outgoings and estimates, which is typically performed at the end of budgeting season. First, we’ll need to create the budget for the next year, based on the pro-rata share for each tenant, then create invoices to the tenants based on that estimate. At end of year, we’ll reconcile those estimates and adjust them based on actual figures, while taking into consideration any provisions in the lease agreement.
These steps are typically performed a few months after year-end close. Follow the same steps from above, but this time, bill the actual reconciled amount due instead of next year’s estimates. Raise the charges on each tenants’ account using your calculated reconciliation amount. This will be added to the tenants ledger as a one-time charge/credit and will get picked up in the next invoice process.
Are you tasked with managing retail recoveries? If you’re already using MRI Commercial Management and accounts payable software, the additional retail recoveries functionality can automate the billing process and shorten the time it takes to perform a reconciliation. Smooth out the cashflow for annual property expenses with estimated monthly billing and generate detailed invoices to your tenants, all while eliminating errors and providing evidence to support calculations.
To see best practices for how to set up retail recoveries in your MRI system, watch the webinar here.
This blog post relates to Rockend, one of our previous brands. For more information please read the press release.
Here at Rockend, we are always looking for ways to make your life simpler through the use of our cloud-based property management software, Property Tree. One of the many ways we do that is with our seamless integrating with a range of inspection apps to make the whole property inspection process as easy and efficient as possible. Rather than locking you in to one provider, we integrate with many, so you can choose the partner that suits you best.
Continue reading “How Property Tree’s integrations improve routine inspections” →
Technology and regulatory necessity have driven Chief Financial Officers to take on more responsibility in their companies. As a result, every CFO needs to excel in three main areas that may not have fallen under traditional CFO roles and responsibilities: understanding the operations of their business, driving innovation both technological and procedural, and reporting financial results to various stakeholders.
For a company to thrive in today’s climate, the CFO should be acting not just as the person in charge of the company’s financial plans. The successful CFOs of the day are keepers of data and educators. A CFO needs an intimate knowledge of the business to then educate internal and external stakeholders and investors about the company’s financial results, show how those results can be bolstered by technology, and identify strategies that can be deployed across different departments to support compliance and, furthermore, financial success.
In order to lead a successful finance department in today’s ever-changing market, a Chief Financial Officer needs to cultivate a deep understanding of his or her business. Fulfilling the CFO roles and responsibilities such as closing the books on time, leading the charge to ensure regulatory compliance, and keeping track of the company’s finances, will be more effective and impactful through an understanding of how the business scales. What drives growth? How must a company operate within the market to succeed? These questions should be top-of-mind for CFOs.
As new financial regulations have been introduced over the past decade, CFOs have been pushed closer to the numbers of their business. Tasked with making sure their organizations are compliant, CFOs need a deeper understanding of the business drivers and key indicators – and not just financial or transactional. While understanding ROI is crucial, CFOs need to be able to evaluate their company’s portfolio performance in order to identify areas of concern and opportunity and play a role in setting the strategic direction of the organization with other senior leaders and investors.
As we progress further and further into the digital age, organizations are feeling the pressure from investors to adopt new technology to cut down the cost of doing business and meet regulatory goals. Given their position, CFOs have the top-level view of the business’s finances which, matched with an understanding of emerging technologies, can help meet investor needs. Cloud-based solutions, strategic partnerships, and system roadmaps are just a few of the technologies that can be leveraged to improve performance and efficiency, and CFOs should be constantly assessing new solutions that could benefit their business.
Implementing new software solutions, however, is not the only effective way to shake up daily processes. The Chief Financial Officer is also in the perfect position to take the reins in driving innovation as it relates to discovering new technology solutions and practices to improve operational efficiency and break information silos between departments. As overseer and analyzer of the company’s financial data, CFOs have all the information at their fingertips to identify areas that could benefit from a reorganized process. Introducing new, data-based ideas can also help cut operational costs and optimize workflow.
Chief Financial Officers have a responsibility to stakeholders (both internal and external) to report financial results and other important metrics. CFOs are no longer able to simply bring profit/loss reports and balance sheets to external stakeholders – investors want to know the explicit details as to where the business stands in each market. In addition to this, CFOs of real estate organizations are also in a unique position to report the ROI of specific properties to individual investors. This way, CFOs can give investors insight into the exact value and performance of individual properties and portfolios.
CFOs should also be reporting financial results to internal stakeholders and training teams such as marketing and operations on the ways to leverage this data. Delivering information regarding sales history, trends, and pricing models to marketing can lead them to improve their strategic planning by analyzing the bigger picture. Presenting cost analyses, productivity models, and capital expenditures to the operations team also gives them the opportunity to adjust their practices and plan out new strategies.
In today’s rapidly-changing business climate, too many companies fall behind the curve of change and struggle to get back on their feet. Whether the challenge looks like operational inefficiency, seemingly-cumbersome regulations, or even unforeseen financial obstacles, CFOs have the ability to take leadership in new ways to help their companies stay ahead of the curve, and more so, to prepare for whatever challenges may face their business. Learn more about the new roles of the Chief Financial Officer and how they affect the way companies do business.
Today, real estate organizations have access to more data than at any other time in history. Data can be leveraged to analyze ROI, report to investors, and develop strategic plans, but a reliance on data could become a weakness if it’s not managed properly. Without reliable real estate data management services, companies could theoretically find themselves basing strategic decisions off of incorrect reports and information that was not accurately recorded.
The way that data is curated makes a difference. Gathering the right information is only one piece of the puzzle — arranging it in a way that makes sense requires a repeatable process that aggregates data from disparate sources to drive meaningful decision-making.
Efficient data management is the key to developing strategies that can elevate your business. Think of your investment strategy as a house. Data management is the brick foundation that holds everything up, and inefficient management of that foundation can put the rest of the structure at risk. Manually processing and collecting data, using out-of-date spreadsheet technology, dividing information into silos, and integrating data are all considered inefficient forms of data management that are either too cumbersome or too prone to human error to be relied upon consistently.
When processing and aggregating your data, you need to be trusting in real estate data management techniques that preserve the integrity of the raw data. The solution to inefficient data management isn’t comprised of simple changes on the process level; investing in real estate data management services is an effective way to bring efficiency back into the data collection and management processes. You need an enterprise-level special repository, a specialized real estate data model with curated data, and on-demand reporting and analytics to properly manage data so that your organization can analyze it and use it for modeling and planning.
While these steps serve as a sort of data lifecycle, it’s crucial that the data be aggregated, organized, or managed efficiently in the first two steps. Failure to do so could result in less valuable data.
Company information from the past, present, and the forecasted future should all be gathered together when preparing to analyze data. Historical asset characteristics, historical asset performance, and historical risk should all be aggregated and overlaid against information from the present, such as on-demand performance monitoring and attribution analysis. Predictions and future calculations that should also be aggregated and considered include transaction simulation, scenario analysis, and risk mitigation.
The data management services offered through MRI Software are designed to process high-level information and deliver the results back to you in the most efficient and effective way possible. First, we collected the data that you submit to us through emails, documents, and other formats, then that data is uploaded into MRI Software’s workflow systems. After this has been done, the data is prepped and reviewed by specialized DMS analysts, and finally, it’s delivered back to you through one of our data management services.
Learn more about MRI Software’s various real estate data management systems and the most efficient ways to collect, aggregate, and process data.
This blog post relates to Rockend, one of our previous brands. For more information please read the press release.
In New Zealand, you are required to rollover your financial year on April 1st to include all transactions on your bank statement up to and including 31st of March. For a straightforward and stress-free EOFY, we recommend following the steps below. Take note that your steps will slightly vary depending on if you charge your fees in the current or in the next financial year.
This blog post relates to Rockend, one of our previous brands. For more information please read the press release.
In an industry where document management is crucial to the success and productivity of the businesses, a reliable cloud solution is a game changer for Property Managers.
This blog post relates to Rockend, one of our previous brands. For more information please read the press release.
Strata Master v11 and File Smart v7.9 are here! In this release we have focused on all the small things you told us would make life that much easier in User Voice.
Let’s take a closer look at the range of enhancements that were designed to save you time and make using your preferred strata management software a breeze.
Continue reading “What’s New in Strata Master Version 11?” →
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