Three Key Considerations for Solving Property Management’s Financial Reporting Challenges
Do you struggle with your financial reporting on Yardi, and find yourself spending hours downloading data and customizing reports? Are you frustrated with relying on IT or consultants to create your reports, and encountering delays and missed deadlines?
Many finance teams using Yardi property management solutions find that they spend excessive amounts of their time on manual reporting tasks, which is exacerbated by the extensive number of reports required for banking and investment accounting. Here we’ve narrowed the challenges down to three top considerations you can evaluate to avoid reporting delays and get back to improving business opportunity and driving profitability.
1. Managing Increasing Amounts of Data
As your business changes, reporting across data from multiple sources becomes more and more important. If you are preparing statements that need to consolidate billing, payments, and repairs across multiple properties, you are going to need data not just from the GL but also from AR, AP, and from specific areas such as rent rolls.
As your rent rolls increase in scale and complexity, you may find that the out-of-the-box templates have to be heavily modified or re-built to continue to function. Can you afford to spend precious time downloading data from each system and mapping it together just so you can start to analyze it? You may need to incorporate data from systems outside Yardi, such as insurance filings, or renter records from a CRM system, as well.
If you rely on your IT department or external consultants to handle this data consolidation, how much time do you spend going back and forth with them to get the reporting right, or to investigate discrepancies? Can you drill down into areas such as unit information, lease dates, market rent, recurring charge amounts, recurring credit amounts, sums of all deposits held, and balances due? As new properties are added, or vacancies filled, more data needs to be assessed and analyzed, adding more stress to your job.
2. Taming Your Reporting Requirements
As reporting demands increase, the ability to respond with the right reporting becomes a significant challenge. When data changes in Yardi, do you find yourself recreating ad hoc reports over and over? How easy is it to refresh the data in your standard reports? When relying on IT or consultants, are you getting the reporting formats you need, or just defaulting to what they give you?
In Yardi, there are some standard reporting options, but to get what you need requires a lot of manual manipulation, or you need to be a power user in SQL, neither of which are ideal. All of these issues add up to delayed reporting and put you at risk of both errors and non-compliance.
3. Eliminating the Time Crunch
If you are an Excel user, it’s likely you know what you want to do with your spreadsheet reporting. But if you have to wrangle with Yardi screen dumps of data in PDF file format, export this to Excel, and then manually customize your reports, you spend more time than necessary to get the results you need.
If you had direct access to Yardi data and the ability to easily consolidate it with other data without coding, then automatically populate the financial report formats you need, you would have more time to deliver insights on rental and lease trends and potential property opportunities.
Ease Your Reporting Burden with the Right Reporting Tool
You can avoid these challenges and automate your Yardi financial reporting using a tool that is purpose-built for your needs in property management. Finance teams know and like using Excel.With a solution that provides the financial reporting templates in Excel that you need, the ability to easily pinpoint and access data across Yardi and other systems, and then refresh it on demand, you can take control of your reporting—speeding reporting requirements with accurate and up-to-date data. The ability to easily drill for details in invoices, rents, cash payments, maintenance charges, insurance, filings, and more—help drive more efficient operations and better control costs. All of these capabilities are possible with Spreadsheet Server, insightsoftware’s financial reporting solution for Yardi.
Want to learn more? Contact insightsoftware for more details on how to speed your Yardi reporting.
