This chapter provides an overview of the tools offered by Oracle Property Manager to manage major real estate tasks, including lease administration and office space allocation.
This chapter covers the following topics:
This section describes the functionality provided by Oracle Property Manager for organizing your property and lease-related information depending on your business needs.
This discussion includes the following topics:
With Property Manager you can abstract, amend, and edit information for your leases.
When you abstract a lease, you extract critical information from a lease document and record that information in such way that you can easily access it, review it, and take action on it.
With Property Manager, you can abstract critical information associated with your lease documents, including:
Payment terms
Billing terms
Options
Key contacts for vendors or service providers
Landlord services
Insurance requirements
You can easily amend and edit lease information, maintaining a detailed history of your changes as you do so.
Property Manager automatically generates payment or billing schedules for each lease you define, normalizing the payment or billing stream in accordance with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). You can then review these schedules each period, authorizing them as they become due. You can also track lease payments in multiple currencies and export payments to your accounts payable system in the currency of your choice.
You can use the Index Rent Increase feature to automatically increase base rent either by a fixed percentage or by an amount proportional to the index change for the remainder of the lease term.
Landlords can use the Variable Rent feature to collect rent based on a variety of variable factors, such as sales volumes, weight, and usage.
Property Manager makes it easy to allocate space in leased and owned locations. You can specify detail for the following spaces:
Regions and office parks
Buildings
Floors and suites
Offices and cubicles
You can manipulate your space definitions and assignments as necessary to perform employee moves or reassign space for different uses. You can track space usage at any level by employee, cost center, or both. For example, you can use this information to charge cost centers for the square footage that they use, ensuring an economical use of available space.
If you use a Computer Assisted Design (CAD) application, or a Computer Assisted Facilities Management (CAFM) application, you can export space utilization information from Property Manager to the CAD or CAFM application.
During the life of the lease, certain events often require action by your company in a timely manner. With Property Manager you can identify those specific events and schedule the appropriate employee action.
Property Manager includes a Milestone feature, with which you can create milestones for key lease events, such as:
Lease and option expiration dates
Insurance payment and renewal requirements
Payment expirations
You can also define any number of additional milestone events that are of importance to your particular enterprise. If you have Oracle Alert installed, you can configure it to generate automatic event notification.
Oracle Property Manager integrates with other Oracle applications, such as Oracle General Ledger, Oracle Payables, Oracle Receivables, and Oracle Human Resources. This integration enables you to use your Oracle Property Manager records as the source of payments and billings, and to use your Human Resources records as a source for employee information in Oracle Property Manager.
Oracle Property Manager also interfaces with third party applications, such as CAD and CAFM applications.
Property Manager provides a set of inquiry windows and standard reports.
Online inquiry screens provide you with instant access to critical information:
Lease provisions
Lease amendments and edits
Service provider information
Transaction history
Payment and billing information
Location configurations and usage
Rentable, usable, and vacant area
Optimal and maximum capacity
Employee space assignments
You can produce standard reports to review:
Lease provisions
Rent schedules
Milestone analysis
Cash flow
Space allocation and utilization
This section provides a brief overview of the flow of information in Oracle Property Manager and the means of navigating through the application.
The following list is a typical sequence of events that you might follow to abstract a lease in Oracle Property Manager:
Set up service providers, and define locations, regions and office parks, milestones, and reporting currencies.
Abstract the lease. (Later, amend and edit it as needed).
Assign employees to office space. (Later, move and reassign the employees as needed).
Authorize payment and billing schedules.
Export payments to Oracle Payables.
Export bills to Oracle Receivables.
Review online inquiries and/or produce reports.
Oracle Property Manager has a multi-window, graphical user interface (GUI) with full point-and-click capability. You can use your mouse or keyboard to operate graphical controls, such as pull-down menus, buttons, lists of values, check boxes, or tabbed regions.
As with all Oracle applications, you navigate through Oracle Property Manager by using the Navigator. The Navigator groups the main tasks that you perform into these main categories:
Leases and Documents
Locations
Agents
Setup
Open Interfaces
Reports
Other
You can customize the Navigator to meet your specific business processes and needs.