The Urbanise Voice

NAI Harcourts, based in Tasmania, specialises in Commercial Sales and Leasing, Business Broking, Commercial Property Management and Strata Management. Urbanise is pleased to be providing world-leading strata solutions to assist NAI Harcourts in delivering quality service.

Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust (SMCT) is a community based, not-for-profit organisation that administers and cares for nine memorial park and cemetery locations within Victoria all boasting rich, cultural and historical significance. SMCT were in need of a solution that comprehensively supported the delivery of asset management to improve on and enhance reporting, planned and reactive maintenance.

Established in 2000, Sunaust Properties has been offering professional services to clients in Australia and overseas in real estate, finance and building management. Sunaust Properties were in need of a cloud solution that offered a single platform for correspondence, accounting and administrative tasks with intelligent banking integrations.

Over the last 6 months, the Urbanise Facilities team have been busy building out new features that were released during the last quarter.  A new "Facility Bookings" module allows Operators to make appointments against their facilities/amenities. The new calendars provide flexible options to model your Locations, Areas and/or Assets to represent different bookable facilities/amenities. A new Facility Bookings dashboard allows Operators to view multiple resource calendars with 'drag-n-drop' ease to manage appointments.

We have recently released two new features that complement existing functionality within the platform - custom fields for Locations and Contract SLA's aligned with configurable business hours. Businesses can now model complex contract agreements within Urbanise by leveraging the new Holiday definitions and Contract SLAs during business hours.

We're continuing to make good progress on a large upgrade of our global search engine that is used widely across all products for efficient filtering and searching (eg. jobs, requests, locations, assets, job plans etc.)  The upgrade will allow us to provide more options to our customers around filtering and searching large data sets.

The Urbanise Strata team finished the year on a high, delivering features for our existing users and preparing to on-board a number of new customers in early 2021. The new feature I’m most excited about is “ePost” – which allows for levies, arrears notices and scheduled reports to be physically posted automatically without the need to subscribe to a 3rd party system. Just enable it in Urbanise Strata and your mail will be delivered.

Reporting continues to be a strong focus with a shift towards “live reports” where possible, some of the changes to reports include:

• Improvements to the “Output VAT” report for the MENA region
• The “Regulation 37” report was added to the Scheduled Reports module
• A number of large reports were converted to the batch process to improve performance
• The “Accounts Receivable Transaction List” report was introduced
• Three new “Live Reports” were deployed including:
  • Debtor Exclusions
  • Collection Report
  • Levy Receipts

Two large new features were also deployed late in the year, a “Common Property” register – which enabled the creation of spaces in a property that aren’t units (such as car parks and storage rooms). These can then be marked as “rentable” and rental invoices raised against them. The other is an enhancement to the Chart of Accounts which allows you to ‘hide’ codes in your master chart and create “plan specific” codes.

We continue to gather and implement changes based on user feedback, some of those changes include:

• The ability to record car details (including make, model, colour, registration) against units
• Searching on the Bing log screen
• New fields in MENA for Mollak and IBAN details on property bank accounts

We look forward to continuing to enhance and evolve the Urbanise Strata platform for our customers in 2021.