Companies we are cooperating with have drawn our attention to a lot of specific processes taking place in enterprises dealing with the management of commercial and office buildings. Acting in accordance with the global strategy of SAP, we have come up with a dedicated solution for this industry. Its most important aspects are described below.

Lease Agreement Register (including detailed lease conditions)

Problem: instant access to all crucial provisions included in the lease agreement is useful both in day-to-day work as well as while generating monthly invoices for the lease of space.

Solution: SAP Business One in the version "Estate Management" makes it possible to enter the following data on each lessee into the register:

• the area of a leased space,
• the joint use space attributed to a lessee,
• the negotiated lease rate for one square meter of a floor space,
• the actual consumption figures for energy, water, telecommunications – the data may be entered manually or imported from external meters,
• charges for energy, water and telecommunications consumption,
• issuance dates of lease invoices,
• duration of the lease agreement,
• a scanned copy of the lease agreement.

In this way, an employee does not have to refer to a paper version of a lease agreement as he has access to all the necessary information. What is more, he can easily find all the lessees whose lease agreements are about to expire.

Automatic Generation of Lease Invoices

Problem: Issuing 300 invoices a month is not a problem provided that these are not the lease invoices comprising of a few sections which are issued only on one particular day in a month.

Solution: Using the data stored in a lessee’s file (floor space area, lease rate, public utilities consumption), SAP Business One - "Estate Management" version can automatically generate lease invoices for all the lessees or for a group of lessees selected by an employee.

Service Calls Processing

Problem: A lessee reports a breakdown, an employee accepts the service call and assigns the repair work to a maintenance technician responsible for this building or to a subcontractor. After a few days, the lessee calls again and asks what has been already done with regard to his service call – in most cases the employee is not able to inform the lessee without calling the maintenance technician.

Solution: In the SAP Business One system – "Estate Management" version there is a module dedicated to the processing of service calls. It covers such aspects as the reaction time negotiated with the lessee and the problem solution deadline (particularly important as regards contractual penalties), the scope of the agreement (including the information which repairs have to be paid for or what the lessor’s obligations are), registering of a service call (including the capability of automatic transfer of the call in the form of SMS message, an email or via fax to a maintenance technician or a subcontractor so that they do the repair work assigned), working hours register and the register of the materials which have already been used.

Lessee’s Debt Collection

Problem: When cooperating with a larger group of lessees each of whom has negotiated different payment conditions, the proper checking of the lease payments becomes really time-consuming.

Solution: Issuing lessees’ debts reminders and collecting lessees’ debts feature in SAP Business One – "Estate Management" version makes it possible to easily automate the work of a person responsible for the inspection of the lessees’ debts. Using a user-friendly Creator informing of the debts, the system will generate proper letters to the respective lessees. The employee’s duty is only to set proper criteria, whereas the system will select the debts amounting to a given sum of money or the debts fallen due by a given period of time. Moreover, the system will ask whether sending a reminder for the same invoice again is necessary or will suggest charging the lessee for all the costs related to the debt collection, depending on the settings stored in the lessee’s file, it will suggest what information a reminder should contain.

Accessing a cooperator’s file, the employee will be able to see the whole history of the reminders sent, the activities undertaken by employees in reference to particular debts.

Cost and Revenue  Analysis

Problem: Storing data in a few systems which are independent from one another (lease agreement register, the accounting, the invoicing) it is extremely hard to get access to the information on: the profitability of a building, a lessee, a building, or the kind of floor space (e.g. whether it is office or commercial one).

Solution: SAP Business One - "Estate Management" version is one database. Entering an invoice for the purchase of security company services, it can be easily associated not only with a building but with a lessee or the type of a floor space guarded (offices, commercial buildings, catering) as well. The same applies to the generation of sales invoices. In this way, one can easily generate a report informing on the total revenue from the lease of a given office building or only on the revenue from the lease of space excluding the consumption of public utilities and compare them with the related costs. The reporting options may be tailored depending on the users’ needs.