Nicola Crosby Real Estate

Yardi client profile

By Leah Etling on Nov 4, 2015 in People

As a senior fund accountant working on a major North American real estate investment fund, Ping Li Chen is constantly looking for ways to generate efficiency in bookkeeping and produce accurate, timely reports for Nicola Crosby’s investors.

“We use Yardi for all kinds of transactions – roll ups, consolidations, foreign currency conversions, bank reconciliation, basically everything we do on a daily basis,” Chen told us at the recent YASC conference in Anaheim, Calif.

Her favorite aspect of the Yardi Investment Management platform is its ease of use. Nicola Crosby Real Estate manages $1.5 billion in assets, so monthly reporting is no small task.

“With the click of a button, I can do the roll up, and it consolidates the whole portfolio. I find that amazing. It eliminated all the Excel spreadsheets that we once used to manually enter data, which we don’t have to do anymore,” Chen said.

Prior to Yardi Voyager 7S, Chen estimated that manually completing the roll-up would have taken an entire month. Now, the process is about 10 days long from start to finish.

In the coming year, her company will take another big step toward process efficiency by training its third party property managers to work within their Voyager 7S system. This will eliminate the need for exporting their external Excel records into Yardi on a regular basis.

“That will save us a lot of time in generating reports,” Chen noted.

Another Yardi product used being implemented by the Nicola Crosby accounting staff is PAYScan.

“We will cut all the checks via EFT, so no more paper checks. And the property managers can import all the invoices directly from the vendor, so the asset managers are able to approve the invoices, and then it’s an easy process. Once we see an approval, we know this is a legitimate expense,” Chen said.

“This improves both our internal and external processes, and helps give investors confidence in how we operate as a fund.”

To learn more about Nicola Crosby Real Estate, visit http://nicolacrosby.com/

To learn more about Yardi, visit http://www.yardi.com