Defining Contacts for Real Estate Management

This chapter provides an overview of contacts and discusses how to establish contacts for a Real Estate Management.

Understanding Real Estate Management Contacts

In PeopleSoft Real Estate Management you can define multiple contacts for a lease or site. Contacts can be defined for various entities such as tenants, landlords, portfolio managers, lease administrators, guarantors, and service providers. Contacts provide you a quick way to look up phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses of the people with whom you normally interact for this lease or site. Additionally, you can assign roles to the contacts for critical date processing such as email reminders of when a lease is up for renewal or a site is created. When setting up your contacts, you need to understand how contacts are used and how PeopleSoft Real Estate Management shares the contacts with other applications in the PeopleSoft system.

There are three types of contacts in the PeopleSoft Real Estate Management system: principal, property site and supplemental. The key differentiation is that you need to enter the data for supplemental contacts, whereas the principal contact information is obtained from the vendor or customer table and site contacts can be added from the address book.

Principal (Vendor or Customer) Contacts

A tenant on a lease is defined as a customer and the landlord is defined as a vendor in the PeopleSoft system. Customers or vendors can have associated contact information that needs to be setup in the customer and vendor tables, respectively. These contacts are known as principal contacts within the PeopleSoft Real Estate Management system. When you create a lease, you must define a tenant (customer) for a receivables lease to perform billing transactions, and a landlord (vendor) for payables leases to process payment transactions. You can also specify an alternate payor or payee for a lease. These tenants, landlords, payees, and payors must be established in the system before you can select them for use on a lease. You cannot activate a lease without this information.

When setting up a vendor, you can create vendor profiles to store all the information such as name, address, payment terms, as well as voucher processing defaults. Vendor information is principally shared by PeopleSoft Payables and Purchasing, so that one or both departments can enter vendor information. You may want to set up your system so that a lease administrator or portfolio manager can enter vendor information, but only PeopleSoft Payables users can approve vendors for payment, or vice versa.

To create or update vendor profiles for all types of vendors in either product, you use the pages in the Vendor Information component. The applications are organized to help you easily enter, update, and inquire about the vendor.

All vendor information for regular vendors, one-time vendors, and permanent vendors is stored in the same set of vendor tables. So if you decide that the contractor that you used last week on a trial basis is the ideal company to use for a long term remodeling project, you can update the Persistence field on the Identifying Information page, without reentering information or storing redundant data.

Warning! A vendor must be set up and approved before you can assign them to a lease.

Before you set up a customer, you must first understand the customer roles to determine the functional use of the customer ID. Customer information is associated with specific customer roles. You can use the customer General Information component to maintain information that applies to multiple customer roles and to select those roles. You can use the pages with role designations to enter processing attributes and additional information that are unique to the customer's function.

Bill to customers receive invoices, therefore a tenant is considered a bill to customer. When you associate a customer with the bill to customer role, you establish default values and processing options that the system uses to generate invoices. For example, you can define attributes to generate consolidated invoices, require purchase order numbers, or bill freight charges at order entry or at shipment for each of bill to customer.

Warning! To send invoices to tenants, you must confirm the tenant is set up as a customer and that the Bill-To check box is selected.

Both the vendor and customer entry pages have facilities to enable entry of contacts, such as individuals who are associated to those vendors or customers by some role that they serve in those organizations. For example, vendor contacts can include account executives, billing clerks, and collections agents. Customers contacts can include AP clerks and sales contacts Since PeopleSoft Real Estate Management shares the vendor and customer tables with other PeopleSoft applications, several contacts may already be set up for these vendors and customers, which is inherited for display on the lease if that vendor or customer is chosen.

Note. Contacts from the vendor or customer tables cannot be updated in the lease, they must be updated on the vendor or customer common component pages. Supplemental contacts are changed on the lease directly, which is why those fields are open and not display-only.

See Maintaining General Customer Information, Maintaining Vendor Information.

Supplemental Agreement Contacts

Supplemental agreement contacts enable you to add additional contacts specific to the lease. Although the vendor and customer tables have multiple contacts, these contacts may not be necessarily related to PeopleSoft Real Estate Management. By adding the contacts directly to the vendor and customer tables, every application that shares the vendor or customer tables automatically displays those contacts. For example, the PeopleSoft Inventory application uses the vendor table for purposes related to inventory processing.

Your organization can decide to add the PeopleSoft Real Estate Management-specific contacts directly to the lease by using supplemental agreement contacts. The supplemental agreement contacts can be used as a quick reference to important contacts that are not already set up. You do not set up supplemental agreement contacts prior to creating a lease or setting up a site. Supplemental contacts are used only for the lease or site for which they are created. If you want to use the same contact on another lease or site, you need to add the supplemental contacts manually onto the other lease or add them as a contact in the address book for sites. The only exception is when you define a guarantor for a security deposit payment. In this case, the supplemental contact that you define on any lease can be used as a guarantor.

You can add, modify or delete supplemental contacts. At a minimum, you must enter the name of the contact. All other fields are optional. You can only delete one of these contacts, if the contact is not referenced either as a guarantor on a security deposit (for any lease) or on a critical date for this lease.

Site and SAR Contacts

A primary contact can be designated for a site. Information entered in the address book will automatically be displayed on the site when selected. Also, supplemental contacts can be entered in manually on the site.

With the contacts address book, users can maintain a list of users and simply select from the list. Once the data for each contact is entered, they can be accessed by the user via a search box on the Site Contacts page. When selecting contacts from the address book, the user will have the option to select from their address book, or from a pre-existing vendor or customer. If a vendor or customer is chosen, the contacts attached to that vendor or customer will automatically be displayed in the Site Contacts list

Prerequisites

Before you select a tenant, landlord, payor or payee for a lease, you must first set up the tenant and payor as customers and the landlord and payee as vendors in the system.

See Maintaining Vendor Information.

See Maintaining General Customer Information.

Establishing Contacts for Sites and SARs

This section discusses how to establish contacts for sites and SARs.

Pages Used to Set Up Contacts Repository

Setting Up The Contacts Repository

Access the General Information page (Set Up Financials/Supply Chain, Product Related, Real Estate Management, Site Acquisition, Contacts, General Information)

Enter general information for the contact. You must select a contact flag value and a preferred communication method. Information entered in this component will be copied onto the site when the contact is selected.

Establishing Contacts for a Lease

This section discusses how to establish contacts for a lease.

Pages Used to Set Up Supplemental Contacts

Establishing Contacts for Leases

Access the Contacts page (Real Estate Management, Lease Administration, Payables Leases, Create New Lease, Contacts).

Customer or Vendor Contact

The contact information varies depending on the type of lease you are creating. The system populates the Customer Contacts information from the Contacts page on the vendor and customer setup table.

Supplemental Agreement Contacts