Case Study
Save time managing your property with Arthur and Xero This case study looks at a property mogul’s experience of switching to Arthur Online. John used his bookkeeper, Helen, to deal with his business needs. With over half a decade of experience with her client’s property portfolio, which began with “a room of lever arch folders and a spreadsheet”, Helen realised it was becoming impossible to do so manually...
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David Cummin, CTO, Arthur Online David is a serial entrepreneur; having been involved in the property sector for over 25 years, David along with his two partners developed Arthur Online. A complete property management software and within this company he holds the role of Chief Technical Officer. He pioneered and was heavily involved in developing the integration between Arthur and Xero.
Transitioning to an Arthur/Xero solution meant that all these issues were going to be resolved. Arthur is configured to dovetail into a Xero set up. Initially, we inputted all properties and set up recurring rent charges in Arthur to ensure 108 / Issue 12
Figure 1 demonstrates how recurring charges appear in Arthur, whereas figure 2 displays these on an Arthur statement with any
miscellaneous charges added. Figures 1 and 2 are carried over into Xero, with figure 3 showing the easy reconciliation process in Xero. This dealt with one crucial issue that most people in the industry suffer from. Helen noted that without software, property managers must “rely on memory” or “continuously check a calendar” for rent due dates on ASTs or various miscellaneous charges. When you have one or two properties this is fine, but when you are managing over thirty this becomes an issue. With an
Fig. 2
Moreover, she had to rely on her client using Dropbox to upload relevant receipts and invoices before having to manually import them into Xero. Once she managed to do this, Helen still had to search to the relevant transactions to complete rent and disbursement reconciliations. Additionally, assessing the performance of each individual property was laborious.
invoices were regularly scheduled. Previously, recurring invoices were generated in Xero; for a successful integration, we removed these recurring invoices and scheduled the Arthur invoices to generate from a set point. Once linked, Arthur acts as your invoice generator. From here, Helen could add any miscellaneous charge and deduct them from remittances.
Note – screenshots have sensitive details such as transaction dates, addresses and names blanked out
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Fig. 3
herefore, she made the decision to move to a software-based system, first choosing a property management tool that did not link with Xero. However, she found she was having the same issues as before; double entry provided a huge stumbling block. The process was better, but still extremely time consuming, whilst also leaving a large opportunity for human error. A lack of automation in the system meant that countless hours were still wasted dealing with calls from tenants; every time she took a call “there was a cost” to her client and “another job didn’t get done.”
Fig. 1
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