Common-area maintenance (CAM) lease reconciliation is one of the biggest challenges retail finance departments face. Usually crafted by lawyers, CAM leases are notoriously difficult to reconcile. More importantly, retailers leave thousands of dollars on the table every year because there’s no easy way to match up invoices to the original CAM lease.

The endless list of line items including growth and variance caps, square footage, base-year definition, and more create havoc for retail finance departments. Far too many are forced to enter invoices by hand and conduct CAM audits through Excel spreadsheets. The manual, labor-intensive process is an anchor on productivity and cost discrepancies often slip by unnoticed.

Now there’s finally an easier way to match up invoices with the original CAM lease contract. Lucernex and Verian technologies have partnered to help ease the pain of CAM lease reconciliation. This Thursday, the two firms will present a special, no-cost Webcast on CAM lease reconciliation. Your hosts will explore automation tools to help mine savings in your CAM leases. Learn more about the value of CAM reconciliation technology.

Who should attend:
Lease administrators, analysts, managers and supervisors
Lease compliance managers
Corporate counsel
Property managers
Lease auditors
Accountants
Paralegals
Attorneys
Attendees will learn how retailers can:
Ease the pain of CAM lease reconciliation
Recoup savings from CAM lease inaccuracies
Better deal with the large amount of invoices coming in
Close the month faster and easier
Automate the invoice workflow process with email
Get more accurate accrual information
Better manage franchise agreements and royalty payments

About Lucernex
Lucernex Technologies offers industry-leading real estate software that supports management of all phases of the real estate lifecycle and provides immediate ROI in cost savings and speed to market. Lucernex Location Performance Management solutions allow you to make smarter decisions, optimize your portfolio faster, and select the best real estate for success. Learn more.

About Verian Technologies
Verian Technologies helps mid- and large-sized organizations reduce costs and increase efficiency with intelligent, easy-to-use solutions that automate the entire purchase-to-pay process including procurement, invoice processing, employee reimbursements and asset management — capturing all spend intelligence in a single database for analysis. Verian was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Charlotte, N.C. The company’s clients include Macy’s, Recreational Equipment Incorporated (REI), Allstate Insurance, PETCO and General Nutrition Centers (GNC). Learn more.

When considering the purchase of real estate software point solutions such as Lease Administration, Project Management, Purchase Management, CMMS and Space Planning/CAFM it is helpful to understand the differences, benefits and challenges of a-la-carte options vs. an integrated suite of products. Individual software solutions are just that – products that are sold individually and have little to no compatibility with other product offerings. Product suites like an Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) are offered as an integrated group of solutions and give the user benefits such as flexibility, ease of use, common overhead, better support for system architectures and platforms. Vendors, like Lucernex Technologies, who build their systems from the ground up using one architecture, one database, one codebase and one common interface eliminate many of the problems encountered with so-called “best of breed” solutions. This blog will illustrate specific examples of why an integrated product suite such as IWMS is best:

First, an IWMS product affords a company software flexibility. Users will be able to share data – including setup and security information – throughout the system and configure the system to meet the company’s needs rather than the other way around. The ability to move data such as deadlines, leasing numbers and budgets without having to re-enter it in multiple places saves valuable time, increases accuracy, and eliminates the frustration that occurs when one part of the system doesn’t talk to the other.

An IWMS solution is also easier to manipulate than single point solutions. All products integrated into an IWMS package look, feel and work the same way. Key interface items like navigation menus, common controls, prompts and messages work together to make the user experience more enjoyable. With a common interface, a user can learn one part of the application and then easily apply this knowledge to another area of the solution. One of the many reasons why Microsoft Office is so widely adopted and successful is because it has a common user interface just like an IWMS product.

Another challenge with implementing multiple software products is that many solutions overlap in areas of functionality. Document management, contract management, security and configuration (form building, report creation, workflow setup, etc.) may have specific areas of the application that are the same. When multiple products try to do similar things the inefficiencies and incompatibilities will render part of these solutions useless. Products within an IWMS system “talk” to one another so that these overlapping areas of functionality work together rather than compete with one another. Who wants to enter contact data twice or define different user security roles because one part of the system cannot talk to another and share the information? With IWMS, all products “talk” to one another, share information, and enable the user to function more efficiently.

A final point to take into consideration is that when a company adopts multiple products they increase their implementation costs, training and on-going maintenance costs dramatically. The purpose of a software solution system is to save time and money and positively impact a company’s bottom line. Often, the implementation of multiple products does just the opposite.

Shameless Plug

At Lucernex, we have a term we like to use for solutions that are banded together, using pieces of various applications to create an end to end solution. We call it a “Franken Product” and if you don’t want a monster on your hands, than consider a single platform IWMS solution. At Lucernex, our response to the “Franken product” is Lx IWMS. The Lucernex Lx IWMS platform is a single platform with one database, one code base and one architecture. It covers the entire property lifecycle with modules dedicated to market planning and location analysis, project management, capital program management, lease administration, lease analysis and facilities management that streamline key processes such as site acquisition and development, construction, procurement, grand opening, lease management, property disposition, and capital or remodeling projects. To avoid the problems, challenges and inefficiencies of a Franken Product, strongly consider a single, integrated solution and beware solutions with a consistent UI that are hiding a “Franken Product” underneath.

For more information about Lucernex Technologies’ Lx IWMS, visit www.Lucernex.com

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Previous Blogs by Ken Brown

Optimizing and Globalizing Real Estate?
It’s time to upgrade lease administration software now

It will probably surprise you as much as it did me when you learn that real estate professionals are the number one user of social media for finding business resources (www.business.com/info/business-social-media-benchmark-study). So what are real estate professionals using social media for and which sites are they using most. The study linked above will tell you that the most common social media use is attending webinars and watching podcasts. A bit more research shows that there are thousands of real estate professionals on the major social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and even Twitter. While these tools are useful for finding out a little about a person and for providing contact information, other real estate professionals are setting themselves apart by creating Blogs and other web resources to provide industry information that many will benefit from. For example The Tenant Advisor: http://www.coydavidson.com/ is a good example of how a single house can use social media to provide information about their market while promoting themselves. The writer also recently provided “scores” for the effectiveness of social media for his business.

There are also real estate specific online networking sites. For example CREOPoint and Realcorner are online resource for broker networking and CREPig is a place for real estate investors to network.

So what is the value of social media and more specifically a blog like this? Should it be a tool to talk about how wonderful your products are, how much your customers love your products or a way to market your value? While Blogs that contain nothing but shameless plugs would make my board of directors happy, they would not likely return any new business nor add any value to the online real estate industry. So, the focus of the Lucernex Real Estate Blog will be to educate. We will provide articles and topics by thought leaders and an opportunity to respond and correspond with those thought leaders.

On our staff we have the “grandfather” of real estate lease accounting software in Ken Brown, founder of National Facilities Group and designer of SLIM, one of the most widely used lease administration packages ever sold. Also on our staff is Jim Duport, a teacher of real estate analytics and the founder and developer of LseMod, the leading cash flow analysis software package for commercial real estate. I will also Blog as the President of Lucernex with over 17 years experience in Commercial Real Estate Software and services and as the designer of our IWMS solution. Even our Chairman will blog here and provide experience gained having been founder, President or Chief Development Officer of several name brands. We will offer topics for discussion regularly and hope that readers ask questions of our experts.

Brown joins Lucernex from Accruent, Inc. where he served as director of corporate solutions for three years. An expert in compliance, lease accounting and business intelligence/analytics applications, Brown was founder, president and CEO of National Facilities Group in Chicago from 1990 to 2005. National Facilities Group is known as one of the nation’s first providers of lease administration software systems in the real estate industry.

“Ken is well known in our industry as having developed the first – and still one of the best – lease administration products, SLIM, for the corporate and retail markets,” said Joe Valeri, president of Lucernex Technologies. “We are honored to add him to the Lucernex team and given his expertise we are looking forward to his influence on our application suites.”

“I have known the people at Lucernex for many years and I am excited to now be a part of the company and to help take its products to the next level,” said Ken Brown. “Lucernex IWMS incorporates the best features of most of the leading products on the market and offers one comprehensive solution.”

Brown has immediately impacted Lucernex by playing a major role in the company’s recent acquisition of Lease Cost Solutions and the LseMod product.

“LseMod is the industry-leading lease analytics toolkit with specialized offerings for commercial brokers and corporate real estate departments. We will continue to expand its capabilities and integrate the power of LseMod into Lucernex IWMS to maximize its potential,” said Brown.

“By helping us close the acquisition of LseMod, Ken has already proven that his contributions to Lucernex will be vital as we continue towards our goal of adding quality product and service offerings to become the market leader in real estate business intelligence software,” said Mike Nuzum, chairman of Lucernex Technologies.

First developed in 2000 and currently in use by numerous Fortune 500 companies, the Lucernex IWMS platform addresses the unique needs of companies with multi-site, rapidly changing real estate portfolios. The solution can be used to manage corporate real estate of any type and also offers market-specific functionality for the retail, restaurant and hospitality sectors. Available in both Enterprise and Standard versions, Lucernex IWMS makes it possible for all real estate management resources to openly communicate and keep all projects on time and within budget. Enabling this kind of integrated communication will ultimately reduce costs, improve productivity, enhance operational efficiency and increase profitability.

About Lucernex

Founded in 2000, Lucernex Technologies (lucernex.com) provides real estate developers and facility managers with powerful software tools to guide them through the real estate development process. For nearly a decade, Fortune 500 companies in the commercial real estate, hospitality, retail, construction and engineering industries, both in the United States and Europe, have been utilizing Lucernex Technologies software solutions every day to better manage the development lifecycle. As an innovative leader in Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) solutions, Lucernex continues to grow its customer base by applying its Web-based software expertise and real estate development insight to provide advanced tools and services for business.