Transcript
I'm Sean Glander I'm the controller and vice president of accounting at Big V Property Group. We started off with just Voyager. Originally it was six back then. Before that we've been using Yardi for almost 30 years, and we've grown since then. With add ons, with different, platforms, different modules, things like that. So as we've grown, you already has grown with us. We still have a Yardi CD in our office that you got mailed the software. It wasn't a SAS. We've grown from just a general ledger software to most of the modules that Yardi offers, and expanded to the transparency internally that I don't have to pick up the phone and call our construction manager, or pick up the phone and call our property management team and say, hey, what's this vendor doing? What's their job? There's nothing to do. It's all the information's right there. When I first started, we had what was called Tenant Cafe, which has since grown to CommercialCafe, and back then it was just originally away from us getting away from printing a statement, mailing it to the tenant, and having then mail a check back. It was just a way for them to view the statement online and make a payment. Now we do work orders through there. We do messaging through there or, announcements, there's a calendar. A lot of our lifestyle centers have events or movies in the field or a waterpark day, or there's a food truck day or a blood drive. Just doing that all under one platform in CommercialCafe is absolutely phenomenal. The advancements in processes and modules that we've added to Commercial Cafe, besides just make a payment. We upload all the lease documents. The tenant can see their leases, all their clauses, they can see their, expirations and their options. And we're very transparent in that the tenant can see everything that we do, every charge that we post, the backup to all the charges, they can see everything. And right from the app. I can see across the portfolio exactly what's happening with that specific tenant in the drop of a hat in one system. Not have to go anywhere and do anything from one platform. See the entire thing. Everything's instant. The tenant sees the direct charges. They see if there's any extra charges. They see if it's just the monthly charges, they paid it automatically. There's a rule to pay it automatically and the rule options are phenomenal because they can pay their monthly charges automatically, but not any additional utility charges or camp charges. Forecast Manager made a significant change in our budgeting process. Our executive team can just look at the dashboard and see what's done, what's not done. And it's phenomenal that you can see right on the dashboard. That widget says my NOI is X. My per square foot rent is Y. You couldn't do that before. You had to wait until everybody reported, get the whole thing together, import the whole batch, then calculate the numbers. You can see if just the construction team entered their thing and they're in the capital planning accepting stage, and they're planning out and they move it from one year to another, you can see that and you can see why. Because they left a note. Our AP department is, for lack of a better term, pretty small is only a handful of people in our AP department. Whereas if we were processing tens of thousands of invoices a month, I would need a dozen or more team members. And right now, having 4 or 5 is phenomenal. We use YES, Yardi’s energy for the utility invoicing and the water invoicing and that happens automatically. We use, procure to pay and the payment processing, PayScan and everything funnels right into a workflow. That workflow gets approved or denied and a lot less are getting denied. Now, I don't have to have accountants look and say, why was that denied? Let me follow up with that. Oh, let me look at that budget line item for the denial. Now it's it's pretty smooth line that we only see the exceptions.