Making the Most of Financial Reporting for Yardi Property Management

Yardi’s property management solutions are widely used by real estate, finance, and investment professionals. Its integrated suite of applications enables owners, managers, and stakeholders to manage services for property owners such as mortgage and utility payments, rent collections, accounting services, inspections, and repair and maintenance. Yet there is a stumbling block that hinders finance managers: reporting.

Financial users are under constant pressure to create a myriad of reports, from the typical period finance reports such as income statements, balance sheets, P&L, etc., to rent roll reports, aged delinquency reports, bank reconciliations, percent occupancy, and bank accounting. Timely and accurate financial reporting is necessary to track tenants’ payments and manage lease agreements, among other tasks. If decisions are based on inaccurate data, cash flow is affected, units are left vacant, and profitability sinks. Reporting on inaccurate data can result in financial restatements or non-compliance with banking regulations, risking regulatory fines or even prosecution for fraud by the SEC.

Finance is constantly bombarded with questions from various departments and customers regarding billing, payments, rents, leases, and more. They must search for needed data to answer those inquiries in a timely manner. They are responsible for a long list of reporting to banks and must construct proper analysis and reporting within required deadlines. This is a constant challenge, particularly as their business changes over time.

The Inherent Challenges in Yardi Reporting

Yardi offers a couple of options for financial reporting, but none seem to really do the job finance needs. In some cases, finance managers find themselves waiting for others to deliver reporting. This is common in those Yardi environments where finance finds itself dependent on IT or external consultants to manage the complexities of Yardi spreadsheet reporting or to create custom reports using a BI tool such as Microsoft SSRS.

If finance does their own reporting, they often have to export various sets of data to Excel and create their own reports, which typically takes hours to complete for one report. Finance users struggle to calculate metrics because of difficulty accessing the right data, or to quickly monitor and react to changes such as tenant turnover, properties won versus properties lost, and average arrears, risking unexpected dips in revenue or loss of profit.

A Better Way: Yardi Reporting Solutions

By taking advantage of purpose-built financial reporting solutions for Yardi, finance managers can avoid the time-consuming tasks of searching for the right data, manipulating data into custom reports, or waiting for their IT team to help them.

With automated, refreshable, self-service reporting, they are assured of fresh and accurate data. Easy-to-configure, ad hoc reporting can help them quickly respond to one-off and custom reporting requests. And if they are an Excel user, a reporting solution that delivers the up-to-date information they need inside of Excel—without them having to understand any of the intricacies of the data behind the numbers—saves hours of manual data manipulation.

Imagine being able to quickly create drillable Excel reports for GL, month-end, and reconciliations. By being able to easily search for needed details such as invoices, rents, cash payments, maintenance charges, insurance, filings, and more, finance teams can accurately identify property opportunities, help their firms drive efficient operations, and better control costs. And by having direct access to Yardi data, they can deliver better insights on rental and lease trends, and more accurately pinpoint potential vacancies and property opportunities, which in turn improves profitability.

Want to learn more? See our financial reporting solutions in action by requesting a free demo.