Your Money is Slipping Through the Cracks

Recently, we published a post about not wasting money.  Since then, I have spoken with some real estate professionals that shared with me another big way to keep more money in their company’s pockets.  What I am talking about is capturing the revenue for billable work that slipped through the cracks.  As commercial real estate managers, companies will often provide services for their clients in the form of work orders.  Unfortunately, sometimes this work is completed, but since the company is using a basic solution to track the work, it never comes full circle to ensure that a bill is issued to the tenant for the services.  Because of this deficiency, companies are losing money without being completely aware of it.  Now, the fact that this is occurring may not surprise you, but what may is the sheer amount of dollars that are being left on the table.

Of the real estate organizations interviewed, the average amount of billable work that slipped through the cracks was about 10%.  That means 1 out of every 10 billable work orders was not tracked sufficiently enough to ensure a bill was issued.  These clients were able to identify this discrepancy after implementing the Workspeed Property Operations solution which enabled them to ensure proper tracking of their tenant service requests from initiation to transferring the charges to their accounting system.

So what does this 10% of missed billable requests equate to?  For each client it differed based on their types of properties; here are some examples:

• Company A manages a commercial office building in a major US city (New York, San Francisco, etc.) They determined that they missed approximately 700 billable request at this property in one year.  Based on their average bill back cost for their work, they were leaving around $70k on the table.
• Company B manages suburban office complexes in a mid-tier US cities. They determined that they missed 500 billable requests at one complex and 200 at another.  Based on what they usually bill back for these services, they determined that they had missed the opportunity to bill for around $30k.

You might think to yourself, “there is no way I am leaving this much revenue behind.”  And you may be right, but I challenge you to look into your own processes and see if you could benefit from a solution that will help you ensure you are capturing all billable service request revenue.