Sales Budget and Forecasting Tool Improves Accuracy and Efficiency
Project at a Glance
RDA developed an application that allows a major real estate investment trust to manage property budgets and sales forecasts in an intranet environment accessible to the entire company. The application also provides reporting capabilities, business metrics, view options, and other analysis tools that helps our client manage their business more accurately and efficiently.
About Our Client
Our client is a multi-billion dollar real estate investment trust which owns over 77 million square feet of office and industrial space in over 20 markets throughout the US and the UK. The company develops, acquires, leases and manages properties with the mission to enhance people’s lives through extraordinary work environments.
Background
Our client is in the business of renting out commercial properties in several major metropolitan areas in the US and UK. Even though they have hundreds of properties, their Accounting Department manually managed budgets and forecasts for future years using Excel spreadsheets. This process was extremely time-consuming, cumbersome and error-prone. It was also severely impacting our client’s ability to forecast their profitability and manage their business accordingly.
Solution Detail
RDA developed SAFE (Sales and Forecasting Engine), which accomplishes the following:
- Allows IT to load current and previous years’ budget numbers and leases for analysis
- Allows leasing agents to enter potential sales transactions
- Allows accountants to enter adjustments to forecasts
- Calculates future profits/losses based upon the numbers entered
- Calculates several metrics such as past, present and future occupancy, renewal rate, average rental rates, growth in rent, lease transaction costs, etc.
- Generates detailed reports
- Provides flexible views of the numbers by geography, property type, property status, sub-markets, etc.
Benefits
As a result of this effort, our client is able to make much more accurate projections as a business, both to management and its investment community. In addition to improved accuracy, our client’s budget management and forecasting process has been significantly streamlined and enhanced, giving back hours to the analysts that can now be spent adding value to the business instead of manually updating spreadsheets.
Technically Speaking
SAFE was designed as an intranet application that leverages the following Microsoft technologies:
- C#/ASP.NET 4.0
- Silverlight 4.0
- Visual Studio 2010
- SQL Server 2005 (Database Engine)
- SQL Server 2008 R2 (Reporting Services)
- Windows Server 2008 R2/IIS 7.5
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