PeopleSoft Real Estate Management Overview Part 9: Payables/Billing, Expense Audits and Security Deposits

Editor’s note — here are all the posts in this series for easy reference:

Welcome back to the Real Estate Management overview series.  I hope everyone was able to enjoy the holidays.  We are now nearing the end of the REM series, and for this edition we will be covering further details on Payables and Billing integration, Operating Expense Audits and Reconciliation, and Security Deposit functionality.

Before we get started I want to point out that I will be using Payables integration (tenant leases) for our main examples but please note that the concepts discussed in this session also apply to Billing integration as well.

Payables and Billing integration

During the lifecycle of a lease, various payments are generated and then subsequently submitted to the AP department and ultimately to the payee for payment.  REM allows you to select leases for payment by a number of different criteria such as BU, lease number, lease administrator, etc., as seen in the Search Criteria section in the screenshot below.

(Click to enlarge all images)

To generate these payments, PeopleSoft utilizes the REM Transaction Generator, REM Transaction Queue and the REM AP/Billing interface to automatically generate rent and other related lease payments with the respective payee and accounting information included.  In addition you have the option to put payments on an auto-approve schedule or require approval for payments in the Transaction Queue before submitting to AP/Billing.

From a personal perspective, the integration from REM to AP/Billing is one of my favorite features of the REM application.  Real Estate departments are usually driven by monthly cycles and often payments requests can require several approval rounds before being released to the AP/Billing departments.  This can often lead to struggles in meeting very tight payment deadlines and in certain circumstances it requires special handling between departments to avoid late payments.  With PeopleSoft REM, the automatic integration process can better facilitate payments made against those tight deadlines and virtually eliminate the need for special handling since all the underlying accounting information is included in the delivered REM to AP integration.

Talking in more detail about the REM payment approval process, REM also allows you to review payments for approval by a number of different ways including BU, lease number, lease administrator, etc.  If a lease is placed in dispute the system can also automatically place all pending payments for that lease on hold as well.  Additionally, the REM to AP/Billing integration includes a built in error checking process to verify that all accounting information is valid at the time of payment and in synch with your general ledger.

Performing Operating Expense Audits and Reconciliations

 

From a definition standpoint, operating expenses are the cost of maintaining a property or building which includes utilities, taxes, insurance, maintenance, cleaning, advertising and promotion, etc.  With PeopleSoft REM you can elect to either pay (or bill) these expenses for the actual amounts or you can alternatively elect to use recurring estimated amounts and perform year end operating expense audits as a tenant (or perform operating expense reconciliations as a landlord).

As part of the audit/reconciliation process, REM provides audit and reconciliation pages where you can load the actual amounts and run a REM process that will calculate the over/under amounts against the estimated payment amounts and then can automatically create the adjusting payments/credits.  The REM system also allows you to set thresholds against your estimates and also has the ability to perform year to year audit comparisons.

Processing Security Deposits and Refunds  

As defined, a Security Deposit is part of the lease financial terms.  REM comes delivered with several security deposit types but the field is user defined.

Delivered REM security deposit functionality allows you to have a different payor/payee from the lease, multiple security deposit types per lease and include an approval process.  For processing security deposit refunds, for “landlord leases” REM includes a Security Deposit “Refund Worksheet” where you can add interest for outstanding deposits, adjust for missing rent payments or deduct for any damages assessed.

This concludes this week’s REM overview. Our next post will be the last in our REM series where we will discuss REM reports and analytics. Until then, see you next time, and thanks for reading.