Financial accounting and service charge management with Horizon

With Horizon, you can enable all income streams generated from your property and assets to be managed and recorded effectively. It provides a complete suite of functions to handle the end-to-end life cycle of all income – from invoicing through to debt management and settlement.

Transactions & Debt

All transactions can be recorded against a customer account, enabling the creation of a complete trading history. Horizon also reflects the holding structure of the customer, thereby monitoring exposure by both parent and brand and enabling parent entities to settle the debt of each constituent company. Likewise, it provides a consolidated overview of all debt for each customer to ensure the coordination of all credit control activities. Debt chasing letters are produced automatically, while all follow-up activities and results are sent to users and centrally recorded on the customer’s account. Where interest can be levied on outstanding debt, Horizon records the terms of the interest charge, and will automatically raise a pending charge subject to management approval.

Tenant Charges

Recurring charge terms will be held against a lease or licence in the system and the charges will be raised when due. A rent demand process is used to approve those charges, which – along with other tenant-facing documents – can be sent via e-mail directly to the customer. To ensure transparency and compliance, a rent-changed report identifies movements in the billings cycle and this enables users to manage by exception – while audit trail and exception reports ensure that this process is robust and reliable. One-off charges can be raised directly against the customer account and are included in many standard leasing workflows; for instance, a one-off charge for dilapidations can be raised when moving a tenant out.

When running a real estate portfolio, it’s essential to be able to easily and effectively manage service charges and other expense recovery requirements. Horizon offers an in-built service charge ledger for a range of common area management and expense recovery situations – and fully supports the latest RICS service charge guidelines.

Apportionments

Multiple schedules can be created and apportioned between the property’s units on either a base or weighted floor area, or a percentage split basis. The functionality provides the ability to make changes to the way the service charge or expense profile is calculated throughout the year – if the size or number of units change as a result of a major development or refurbishment, the service charge is apportioned appropriately.

Calculations

Expense recovery caps or floors negotiated with the tenant can be reflected on a lease-by-lease basis, which in turn can then be indexed and modified year-on-year. In addition, budgets can quickly and easily be entered into the system using a standard two-way Excel interface, allowing actuals to be downloaded from the current year service charge, modelled extensively and then uploaded back into Horizon.

Reports

Reports analyse actual costs against planned expenditure throughout the course of the year, enabling effective cash flow management and online reconciliation. These reports illustrate the vacancy cost for the service charge year-to-date, identifying both the amount of irrecoverable charges associated with the property – which can be automatically billed back to the landlord as required – and the reason for that cost.