Put on your finance pants, we’re about to talk about tenant billing.
If you are not using a cloud automation tool or its equivalent when you are calculating tenant billing services you are losing money–period. Check out the quick facts and quick returns on investment when you switch from a spreadsheet to automated tenant billing.
Did you know that a leading global financial services firm lost over 3 million dollars because they operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets that were completed manually by CUTTING AND PASTING financial data from one spreadsheet to another?
This goes to show that even some of the world’s smartest bankers have trouble mastering Excel, and commercial real estate industry professionals are no different.
Spreadsheets? Stop Using Them.
One of the worlds largest financial model building and training companies, F1F9, also conducted a study which estimated that 88% of all spreadsheets have errors in them, while 50% of spreadsheets used by large companies have material defects.
Beyond the loss of time and money invested into spreadsheets, F1F9 highlights that these errors damage the reputation of companies.
At the end of the day, we’re human and by nature we are prone to making errors no matter how competent we may be. When you automate tenant billing, you go from being 12% accurate, to 99.9% accurate.
Undercharging Tenants? Oops, you’re paying for that in more ways than one.
When you have a manual process for financial data entry, you run the risk of undercharging your tenant for billable services such as, after hours HVAC, submeter billing, and parking validation. This creates tenant billing leakage, which means that your building is losing its potential profit every month.
Just as bad, is the opposite: Over charging tenants. This has more devastating consequences because when (not if) your tenants find out, you will lose their trust completely and that’s something that you can almost never get back. Don’t let the fate of your tenant retention and satisfaction rate lie in the cells of an Excel sheet. Instead, utilize automated cloud solutions to ensure that your retention and satisfaction rates keep reaching toward the sky.
Quick Returns on Investment:
Transparency and Reporting
When a tenant is questioning their bill, how do you attempt to explain the Sudoku of calculations on your master billing sheet? Eep.
When you automate the billing process, you provide transparency by having clean and simple itemized cost break downs that are easy for tenants to digest and trust. In most cases, billing automation tools can also provide reporting functions to your team and tenants. This comes in handy especially when you’re billing for energy related services like after hours HVAC and submeters because it gives tenants visibility into their energy consumption. Automation encourages tenants to be more mindful of their daily office habits and strive to be more energy efficient to keep costs down.
What does this mean for you? Tenant transparency equals tenant retention, increased tenant satisfaction, enhanced energy savings, plugs billing leakage, and creates incremental revenue increases.
Save Time for Everyone on the Team
One small error in one transaction often affects all subsequent lines of the billing sheet. If you are currently passing around a spreadsheet back and forth between a group of people, this exacerbates the situation even more. When errors are caught, the whole team suffers and additional labor time is spent investigating why the error occurred in addition to the time spent correcting it.
When you streamline tenant billing, you remove the mundane and sometimes painful task of data entry that are below your team’s skill level. It’s also a quick and effective way to meet management and tenant demands with ease and speed making the whole team more efficient and able to concentrate on more important tasks. Billing automation is truly a helping hand to everyone on your team and stops slips while the clock ticks.
Is the cloud magic? Absolutely. But it can only work it’s magic if all your employees are trained on how to use the software correctly.
Request a demo to learn more. We’ll show you how our software works and where there are likely errors in your process.
