In the world of property management and real estate, data is everything. Whether you’re tracking financial performance, monitoring tenant activities, or analyzing property operations, having accurate and actionable insights is key to making informed decisions. This is where Yardi, a leading property management software, steps in. Offering a powerful suite of tools to help businesses stay on top of their operations.
Among the most valuable features of Yardi is its Custom Reports functionality. While Yardi offers a wide array of standard reports, the ability to create Yardi Custom Reports tailored to your specific needs is a game-changer. These custom reports allow you to dive deep into your business data and extract exactly what you need for analysis, decision-making, and strategy planning. However, to truly maximize the potential of Yardi Custom Reports, you need to know how to navigate the system, build meaningful reports, and extract the right insights.
In this guide, we’ll explore how you can make the most of Yardi Custom Reports and why they’re an essential tool for any property management business.
What Are Yardi Custom Reports?
Before diving into how to use Yardi Custom Reports effectively, it’s important to understand what they are and why they matter.
Yardi provides a robust reporting engine that lets users generate reports on various aspects of their property management operations, such as leasing, tenant payments, financials, maintenance, and more. While the standard reports offered by Yardi cover a wide range of use cases, Yardi Custom Reports give you the flexibility to create reports that are tailored specifically to your business needs.
These custom reports can be designed to:
- Combine data from multiple Yardi modules (e.g., leasing, accounting, maintenance).
- Focus on key metrics that matter most to your business.
- Customize the format and layout to fit your preferences.
- Include filtering and sorting options to highlight the most relevant data.
Whether you’re looking to track your portfolio’s financial performance, analyze tenant occupancy rates, or identify cost-saving opportunities in maintenance, Yardi Custom Reports allow you to generate actionable insights specific to your needs.
Start with Clear Objectives for Your Report
The first step in creating an effective Yardi Custom Report is to define exactly what you want to achieve. The beauty of custom reports is their flexibility, but that flexibility also means you need to have a clear objective in mind to ensure the report provides value. Without a well-defined goal, you may end up with a report that’s too broad or cluttered with unnecessary data.
For example, are you looking to:
- Track financial performance? If so, you might want to build a report that shows rent collections, outstanding balances, and cash flow by property or tenant.
- Analyze tenant performance? You may want a report that highlights lease expirations, renewal rates, or tenant satisfaction scores.
- Assess maintenance costs? In this case, a report that pulls data on work order completion times, maintenance expenses, and vendor performance could be useful.
By knowing what you want to measure, you can filter out the irrelevant data and focus on what matters most. Setting a clear objective will guide you in selecting the right data fields, filters, and layout for your Yardi Custom Reports.
Leverage Filters and Grouping for Better Insights
One of the best features of Yardi Custom Reports is the ability to apply filters and grouping options to organize and drill down into your data. Whether you’re analyzing rent collections or maintenance costs, filters allow you to narrow the scope of your report to focus on specific time periods, property types, tenant categories, or other key variables.
Here’s how you can leverage filters effectively:
- Time Filters: For example, if you want to track monthly rent payments or quarterly expenses, set up time-based filters to analyze specific periods.
- Property and Tenant Filters: If your portfolio includes a range of property types or tenant categories (e.g., commercial, residential, or mixed-use), grouping and filtering by these parameters will help you compare performance across different segments.
- Status Filters: You can filter reports to show only active leases, pending maintenance requests, or current arrears, helping you focus on what’s most relevant to your operations at any given time.
Once you’ve applied the necessary filters, use grouping to organize your data logically. For instance, you might group by property or by tenant to see how each segment is performing.
Customize Layout and Design to Enhance Readability
While the data in your Yardi Custom Reports is crucial, how you present that data is just as important. After all, a report that’s difficult to read or understand isn’t very useful, no matter how detailed the data is.
Yardi allows you to customize the layout and design of your reports, so they’re visually appealing and easy to digest. Here are some key design elements you should focus on:
- Headers and Titles: Make sure your reports have clear titles and section headers to help readers understand the purpose of the report and the data they’re viewing.
- Charts and Graphs: Where applicable, use charts, graphs, and other visual aids to represent data trends. These can be especially helpful for financial reports, occupancy rates, and maintenance cost analysis. Visuals often make it easier to spot trends and anomalies.
- Sorting and Ranking: For tables that include large amounts of data (such as rent rolls or tenant balances), sorting the data by important fields (e.g., lease expiration date, outstanding balance) can improve readability.
- Summaries and Totals: Including summary rows and totals for key metrics (such as total rent collected or total maintenance expenses) can give users a quick snapshot of the data without needing to dig into every line item.
Designing your Yardi Custom Reports with the user in mind will make the information more accessible and actionable.
Use Advanced Calculations and Formulas
One of the most powerful aspects of Yardi Custom Reports is the ability to incorporate advanced calculations and formulas. For businesses that need to track complex metrics—such as operating income, expense ratios, or capital expenditures—being able to use formulas directly in your reports is a significant advantage.
For instance, you could use calculations to:
- Compute occupancy rates: By dividing the number of occupied units by the total number of units, you can quickly assess the health of your portfolio.
- Track debt service coverage ratios (DSCR): This is crucial for assessing the financial health of a property and ensuring it generates enough income to cover its debt obligations.
- Calculate ROI (Return on Investment): Use formulas to evaluate the return on each property or tenant investment, helping you decide where to focus your resources.
By incorporating calculations into your Yardi Custom Reports, you can generate more insightful metrics that go beyond raw data and help drive strategic decisions.
Schedule and Automate Report Distribution
Creating great Yardi Custom Reports is only half the battle—getting the right information to the right people in a timely manner is equally important. Yardi allows you to schedule reports for automatic generation and distribution, saving you time and ensuring your team stays informed.
For example, you can:
- Set up weekly or monthly reports to be automatically generated and emailed to key stakeholders (e.g., property managers, financial officers, executives).
- Distribute reports based on roles: Create different reports for different team members. For instance, a property manager might only need tenant-related data, while the finance team might need detailed financial reports.
- Avoid manual effort: Instead of manually running reports every week, automate the process to ensure your team gets the data they need without additional effort.
This automation helps maintain consistency in reporting and reduces the likelihood of human error, all while saving time for more important tasks.
Take Advantage of Yardi’s Integration Capabilities
If you use other software tools alongside Yardi, you can further enhance the value of Yardi Custom Reports by integrating them with your existing systems. Yardi has a range of integrations with third-party applications, such as accounting systems, CRM tools, and business intelligence platforms.
By integrating Yardi with other systems, you can:
- Pull in external data for a more comprehensive analysis.
- Consolidate reports from multiple platforms into one cohesive view.
- Ensure consistency across all systems, reducing the need for manual data entry and improving the accuracy of your reports.
Using integrations can significantly enhance the power of your Yardi Custom Reports, giving you a more holistic view of your business.
Conclusion
Yardi Custom Reports are a powerful tool for property managers and real estate professionals looking to gain deeper insights into their business. By following the best practices outlined in this guide—setting clear objectives, leveraging filters and grouping, customizing layouts, using advanced formulas, automating distribution, and integrating with other systems—you can create reports that are not only informative but also actionable.
Custom reports help you stay ahead of the curve, make data-driven decisions, and ultimately drive success for your business. If you’re not already taking full advantage of Yardi Custom Reports, now is the time to dive in and unlock the potential of this powerful feature. With the right approach, your reports will become an indispensable part of your property management strategy.
