Properties are often loath to make any changes in their Owner Accounting processes because they may have a somewhat tense relationship with their Owners and don’t want to do anything that might upset the status quo and/or lead to making amendments to their rental contracts. Consequently, they continue to do what they do in the same way, month after month, for years which means they are likely not taking advantage of more contemporary concepts or using new software tools to make rental management easier or more fair and transparent to their owners.
As the leader in whole and fixed fractional ownership, SMS|Host has accumulated quite a library of posting, reporting and distribution tools that can simplify or speed up the period-end process. Over the next several posts, we’re going to be taking a look at various ways you might streamline your procedures and, perhaps, discover some functionality you didn’t know was in your system.
Charging or distributing interest is a notion that is often overlooked. Most rental contracts contain a provision for charging late fees to Owners on overdue debit balances but these are usually nullified by rolling the amount to the following period in which it would be offset by rental revenues. In practical terms, late fees are more likely to apply to debit amounts that can be isolated on an alpha folio such as the (M)aintenance or, in some cases, the (E)scrow. SMS|Host has the perfect utility for this purpose – Post Interest Char(G)es (Owner Management à Posting Tools). It offers a variety of selection criteria, works with flat amounts or calculation percentages and produces a report of results following posting.
Some properties use earned interest on long-term credit balances as a benefit to Owners in their rental or facility service programs. SMS|Host has two utilities that work well in these circumstances, both from the same Posting Tools submenu. One, Post Interest Pay(M)ents, is used to calculate a percentage of a key-date balance. The other, Dis(T)ribute Interest, allocates a flat dollar amount as a ratio of each Owner’s applicable balance to the total credit balances. Both reports offer a proforma view prior to posting.
If you have avoided either of these practices out of concern for the complexity involved or assumed it would be a time-consuming effort, you should reconsider how these easy-to-use utilities might fit into your operation.
Next time, we’ll take a look at three auto-posting utilities that can make an Owner Accounting Manager’s life so much easier.
