Finance automation for property management

A cleaning invoice arrives. The total is right, but the supplier name doesn’t match anything on your supplier list, and the address gives the estate without saying which block. Before anyone can approve it, someone has to work out the fund, the schedule and the heading.

Almost all of that can be worked out from records you already hold. Here’s how that works for block and estate managing agents, across supplier invoices, utility bills, approvals and posting into your property accounting system.

Reading the invoice is only half the job

Getting the total, the VAT and the supplier name off the page is the easy bit. It doesn’t tell you which supplier record this is, which block the cost belongs to, or how your coding rules say it should be charged.

So automation for property invoices has to connect the document to your records and your rules. When it can’t be sure, it has to say so, and hand the decision to a person.

Match suppliers and properties before anything posts

Each invoice is checked against your supplier and property records. The evidence is usually mundane: a supplier alias you’ve seen before, a postcode, a supply address. Your coding rules then propose the fund, schedule and heading.

When a match is ambiguous, the invoice goes to review with the original document next to the extracted details. Your team can see what was proposed and why, and correct it before it moves on.

Most of the retyping goes away, and nobody is asked to accept a decision they can’t see the reasoning for.

Keep current charges apart from old balances

A utility bill can show current charges, a balance brought forward and an amount to pay on the same page. Only one of those is this period’s cost.

Say a bill shows £412.18 in current charges and £872.42 brought forward, for an account balance of £1,284.60. Post the £1,284.60 and last period’s charges are in your accounts twice.

Processing set up for each utility supplier pulls out the current charge. Energy VAT and Climate Change Levy are checked against how you’ve configured them, and anything odd is flagged for someone to look at. The accounting treatment stays your team’s call.

Route approvals by responsibility and spending limit

Approval routes follow your authority limits. Some invoices need a property manager, some need client accounting as well, some need two signatures. If the approver is away, the invoice goes to their delegate. If it sits too long, it gets chased, then escalated.

Before any of that, the invoice is checked for likely duplicates, differences from the supplier record, totals that don’t add up, and a mismatch with the purchase order where there is one. Anything that fails goes to review. Everything else follows the route you agreed.

A note on bank details. Matching them to the supplier record tells you they agree with what you already hold. It can’t tell you the account is genuine, so your checks on supplier bank changes still matter.

Keep the evidence behind every service-charge entry

When a client accountant or a leaseholder queries a cost, the amount on its own won’t answer them. You need to show which property it relates to, how it was coded and who approved it.

The original invoice, the extracted values, any changes, the approvals and the posting outcome are kept together. Whoever picks up the query has the whole record in one place, without digging back through old email threads.

Whether a cost can be recovered through the service charge is still a question for your team and your advisers. Having the record just makes it quicker to answer.

Posting into your property accounting system

For MRI Qube, approved invoices post directly into Qube and the Qube reference comes back to the invoice record. Qube stays your accounting system.

For Blocks Online and other systems, the connection is usually a CSV or flat-file export. We check the format your system expects before we confirm it will work.

What this looked like at Innovus

Innovus, a property management company, was keying supplier invoices into MRI Qube by hand. Each one took 2 to 3 minutes, even when it matched the supplier and purchase order cleanly, and six full-time contractors did nothing but invoice entry and matching.

Stratas automated the capture, matched invoices against supplier and PO data, and posted them straight into Qube. They now process 8 invoices a minute, and no longer need contractors for invoice entry.

Read the full Innovus story.

Start with the invoices your team has to untangle

The best place to begin is whatever causes the most work now. Usually that’s a utility bill with several balances on it, an invoice nobody can place against a property, or an approval that always gets stuck.

Bring a few of those to a demo. We’ll go through your coding rules, who approves what and which accounting system you use, and we’ll say where automation helps and where a person should keep checking.