Real Estate Company Collaborates with BDO Digital to Transform Their Financial Reporting

A publicly traded, Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) located in New York is setting new standards for the retail shopping experience. Their goal is to become an industry leader in sustainability and bring environmentally friendly elements to its portfolio of open-air shopping centers located in the top U.S. markets.

Challenged with the manually intensive, time consuming efforts their employees were spending producing reports, the REIT determined it was time to invest in data analytics to return their team to other high-priority initiatives. They needed a service that could help produce accurate, near real-time financial reporting supporting portfolio and property health for both ongoing, proactive portfolio management.

BDO Digital was highly qualified to support the REIT with their in-depth knowledge of REIT reporting challenges, coupled with proprietary intellectual property and delivery accelerators specifically designed for their industry.

Custom Reporting Solution  

The REIT has developed a long-term relationship with BDO Digital where we worked together to introduce a new data warehouse, data analytics cube, and a proprietary Master Data application.

Previously, forecasted lease executions were manually entered and aggregated through custom formulas in Excel and versions were saved for any new data entry. The process was time intensive to enter data and to find the most recent Excel version. Data integrity concerns resulted from the risk of entering identifying data that did not match MRI, the REIT’s property management system, and updates to Excel that broke custom formulas.

BDO Digital implemented a custom master data application and user interface for capturing forecasted leases in a more streamlined, user-friendly interface. The entered data was consumed by the data warehouse and cube, eliminating data quality issues and the need to manually associate the data in Excel.

Results

The REIT now has some of the most sophisticated reporting capabilities in the industry on modern technology supporting portfolio management, while simultaneously helping improve employee experience. They now have an all-encompassing view of the General Ledger, Accounts Receivables, Occupancy, and Leasing data domains. New screens supporting the management of account hierarchies and properties enhance the end-user experience. In addition to the IT Team that is supporting the solution, the Finance teams have found their jobs easier to perform.

Differentiators:

• Systemic data capture supporting customized reporting
• Consolidated reporting via one centralized, governed system
• Expedited report generation sourced via the cube
• Enhanced reporting capabilities allowing replacement of static PDF reports with self-serve, dynamic analytics

Future Plans

The ongoing relationship between the REIT and BDO Digital demonstrates the power of data analytics and custom application development for the real estate industry. Following the completion of the foundational data warehouse, cube, and custom master data application, the REIT is now looking to integrate data on the full lifecycle of the lease into their reporting capabilities.