EPMEPM: Technology & Social

Meet the (New) Office Genius

Consider this; On average, it takes around 40 seconds for a property manager to manually enter an invoice. If your agency manages a rent roll of around 1,000 properties, you are more than likely manually entering in the vicinity of 20,000 invoices a year. This equates to approximately four working weeks spent doing mundane, repetitive but important admin work. Meet the genius from Rockend that fixes all of that.

Photo: Andrew Emanuelli

If there were a tool that could give you back two and a half out of the four weeks a year you would normally spend on manual invoice entry, would you make whatever change was necessary to get that time back and spend it doing something more meaningful?

You don’t need to be Einstein to answer that question; the benefit of that change makes it an overwhelming yes, but what has been lacking is the availability of technology to bring that intention to reality.

That is why the launch of Rockend’s new Invoice Genius is so exciting – because now that technology is ready and available for PropertyTree users.

“The demand for robust cloud property management solutions is only going to continue to rise, which is why Rockend’s development and product teams have been hard at work creating an array of new and exciting features, such as Invoice Genius,” explains Andrew Emanuelli, the product owner of Invoice Genius, who has been working in document management solutions across an array of industries for over 15 years.

Invoice Genius is an intuitive and useful tool that automates the processing of creditor invoices, supporting the elimination of wasted manual labour when it comes to paying creditors.

MEET INVOICE GENIUS
As approximately 60 per cent of invoices are now coded, Invoice Genius has been engineered to read and process both QR codes and barcodes, giving you back 60 per cent of the time you would usually invest in data entry. That’s a lot of time back in your calendar for you to invest in strengthening your relationships with existing clients and growing your business.

ELIMINATING PAPER
There is no question that the future is going to be digital by default. Governments and the private sector are collaborating on ways to bring in a digital future, and customers will be thinking digital first and expecting that efficiency across all of their transacting.

“Every minute of their day is highly valuable, so we set out and created a feature which not only scans, processes and digitally files documents, but one that streamlines our clients’ processes and workflows – thereby making them increasingly agile and efficient, whilst putting time back in their day that they can spend growing their business and investing in providing exceptional customer experiences,” says Emanuelli.

DESIGNED FOR POWER USERS
“To create Invoice Genius, the Product team has worked closely with our User Experience team, and stakeholders within the wider Rockend team who have previously been in property management, for approximately six months to ensure that our customers’ needs were at the core of its design.

“The goal was to create an intuitive tool which required little to no training, so that property managers and administration staff can start using this straight away. The feedback we received from the sample of our customers – current users of REST Professional, fileSMART and PropertyTree – who participated in Invoice Genius’s beta testing confirms that we have achieved this goal and then some,” says Emanuelli.

The goal was to create an intuitive tool which required little to no training so property managers and administration staff could start using it straight away.

WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER
Beyond digitising invoices and automating workflows and business processes, Invoice Genius offers property managers opportunities to get more out of their days by:

  • Helping an office go paperless and creating more space in their office as filing systems will no longer be needed
  • Handling and processing hundreds of different creditor invoices in minutes
  • Reading both QR codes and barcodes – Invoice Genius is the first digital document management system in property software that has this ability
  • Eliminating manual data entry errors as it reads the data directly from the barcode or QR code on the invoice
  • Eliminating invoice payment errors
  • Providing an increased level of transparency and clarity in document storage through the PropertyTree document drop
  • More than halving the amount of time usually spent processing creditor invoices. With Invoice Genius, property managers can reduce the usual 40 seconds per invoice to approximately five to ten seconds each.
  • Maximising productivity.

DOCUMENTATION MADE EASY
“Invoice Genius will be a part of the document management solutions we are looking to create in the wider ecosystem in PropertyTree, and this initial version is just the tip of the iceberg,” continues Emanuelli.

“Looking at the future of paper and document storage, we are looking at smarter systems with a lens of inevitability. With the increased capabilities of technology for electronic documents and signing, along with the regulatory mandate to make the switch to a digital property industry, the days of the scanning machine are numbered. The new wave of digital tools for recognising, automating and filing electronic documents seem certain to sentence the scanner to join the technology graveyard next to the fax machine.”

GET YOUR HANDS ON INVOICE GENIUS
The wait is over to experience an end to the old-school scan-queue-allocate-pay-save cycle, with PropertyTree customers able to access Invoice Genius when it launches in October 2017.

Discover how much time Invoice Genius can save your business by making the switch to a modern, simple, integrated payments application.

Contact Rockend for a demonstration today.

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Sarah Bell

With a background in research and investigations, Sarah Bell married into the real estate industry in 2009 and has found a passion for both the business and its people.