Los Angeles-based Lowe is a leading national real estate investment, development and management firm in the commercial, hospitality and residential property investment sectors. In its 46 years the company has developed, acquired or managed real estate assets across the U.S. valued at more than $28 billion. Lowe manages commercial properties for institutional clients and joint venture partners. Challenges in managing portfolio growth and demands from clients for efficient service and profitability prompted the company to adopt Yardi Voyager in March 2013 The Balance Sheet asked Cindy Pearl, Lowe’s vice president/property operations controller, for a status report. Q: How has Voyager impacted your business? Pearl: I’ll offer just a few examples of how Voyager saves time on transactional items: Cutting an entire step by reversing charges and having the zero-cash receipt automatically apply itself. Saving a day of work for my cash receipts person by doing automatic application of pre-paids. Automatically sending A/R reports to our property management teams three times a month. The ability to enter multiple charges to one tenant on one screen is brilliant. We don’t have to apply pre-paid rents to the next month because they’re auto-applied.  And we don’t have to do a zero-receipt batch for reversed charges. I love the flexibility, the analytics and how far you can drill down. Q: What aspect of Voyager stands out the most in your mind? Pearl: Its value to us goes far beyond numbers. Its effects aren’t measured just in time savings but in improved work attitudes and morale that come from eliminating multiple repetitive tasks. Voyager has produced a cultural shift by empowering our property management teams to collect receivables information and act on it on their own without help from corporate Q: You’ve been with Lowe more than 30 years.  What would you like people to know about the company? Pearl: Lowe has a strong, values-based culture that encourages people—like me—to build our careers here. Beyond that, the thing about Lowe that has always amazed me is that we’ve survived all the business down cycles. We always come out of them. I think that says something about our tenacity, our management philosophy and our adaptability. Q: Back to Voyager—what else does it do for you? Pearl: It’s an amazing amount of information that people can turn into financial sense. I can run a transaction register for one tenant on one rent charge, or a tenancy report that shows everybody in a building with a renewal clause, all in one place. We can give appraisers, lenders or brokers a snapshot rent roll, custom rent roll, abstracts and tenancy schedules without having to pull out 140-page leases. We’re no longer spending hours figuring out a renewal.  It’s like window-shopping: you can decide what you want, click a few buttons and get the report. Sometimes you almost don’t have to think for yourself anymore.  It’s almost like breathing; it just happens.  I almost can’t remember a time without Voyager. Learn more about Lowe....