Yardi Voyager provides residential and commercial property management software. Capabilities include integrated accounting, lease renewal workflow, and modules for multi-family, senior, and affordable housing, as well as retail, office and industrial units.
The company was founded in 1984 and has 4,000 employees and 35 offices around the world.
Yardi is more user-friendly, dynamic, and comprehensive than other similar products in the real estate space. While there is some ramp-up time to learn the system, Yardi is pretty intuitive and literal, which removes much of the confusion that other systems offer. Voyager also …
We have always utilized Yardi as our accounting system. We did, however update from Yardi Genesis to Yardi Voyager several months and have experienced first-hand the many advantages to conducting the update. Voyager has enabled us to elevate the level of reporting we provide …
AvidXchange is well suited for companies with multiple locations where approvals may be hard to get directly. A user can log on when they have time basically from anywhere to review, code and approve invoices. This would allow for processing of invoices centrally more efficiently then with appear invoices being moved from one place to another to be processed
Yardi Voyager is best suited for users in the multifamily and commercial real estate space, and can be used across a wide range of employee roles, including management, leasing, maintenance, operations, asset management, ownership, and more. On the leasing side, Yardi Voyager is best paired with either Yardi CRM or Yardi CRM IQ (Yardi's newest feature program), as they bring a more robust CRM product that helps with managing prospects and residents. Yardi Voyager houses operations for the majority of integrations across a wide range of industries and vendors, and it comes highly recommended by those industries and vendors when it comes to use of APIs and cross functionality
Our contractors and vendors can submit invoices electronically through AvidBill, removing the tedious task of sorting and coding mail. This feature saves on time and administrative duties.
Communication is key, and being able to log a comment or question in AvidInvoice allows for clarification and expedited approval process.
Having multiple properties, having the Property Code and % Allocation features allow us to ensure the correct entity is charged it's portion of expenses. For example, we may have a service that is coded to all 32 properties. With AvidInvoice we are able to allocate each entity's pro rata share of the invoice.
The out-of-box reports are comprehensive and dynamic, in that you can drill down into specific data columns to see more detail.
The setup of properties is simple and intuitive, and not that different from other multifamily software competitors, which helped with the transition.
The residential Manager dashboard hosts a great snapshot of the property management performance of a property in real-time. It is easy to locate current occupancy, leasing activity, and maintenance request data.
AvidPay needs some improvement to minimize the amount of time it takes to issue payment for invoices
The search features within AvidXchange on the advanced search screen sometimes do not function correctly (sorting by ascending / descending order doesn't work all of the time).
The log enhancement follow-up procedure could use some work.
In my experience there's a fairly steep learning curve for a new user to be able to navigate the system
While there's diverse functionality, many items seem buried in menus or obscure places, particularly the first time you're trying to find them
Getting used to the refresh functionality in some parts of the system can be challenging if you're used to a system that automatically updates when new filters are applied
We have invested 5 years of setup, implementation and training on Voyager. It's doing a very good job for us and I feel we've only scratched the surface of its capabilities. Yardi support has been very responsive with very little down time. The training materials are great from Client Central
AvidXchange is very easy to use and the customer service is always there is you need help or more training. New employees even comment on how easy it is to pickup the program.
Overall it is a reliable and relatively easy product to utilize. No Property Management Software is simple to implement, so a return on investment is delayed and care should be made to ensure that this platform does everything you need for it to do. Experience and knowledge in SQL programming language is helpful, as there are many SQL reports and scripts available to be able to better utilize the software. It takes time to find the ones useful and the ones that resolve hiccups.
The local office is very knowledgeable, however recently it seems that Yardi has begun to route calls offshore and the knowledge base there does not seem to be as strong as the USA based support centers. All customizations are done by offshore personnel, which presents issues in terms of the language barrier and time zone differences.
If you are converting from another system, grouping your properties by subsidy type seemed to help us. We were able to focus on a half dozen properties at a time, rather than the entire portfolio.
We are presently evaluating a move to Concur Invoice, not because of any real lack of functionality from AvidXchange, but simply because we have other business functions already on Concur Invoice. From what we have seen so far, the functionality is similar, though I believe Concur Invoice is more expensive.
Citrix and Argus are property management tools that each fill a function. Citrix is used to track real time payments, while Argus is used for modeling and cash flow analysis. Yardi combines many of the features between the two. Though it is more difficult to use, fully integrating Yardi into a company could save time and money and standardize many of the finance operations of Real Estate asset management firms.
Plugin in updates are a pain point. I think when Yardi has updates that they should have vetted it and that us the client shouldn't have to test thousands of plugins to see what is different. Just leaving the information on client central for the end user to look at, at their leisure is in my opinion not the best way to handle, you should send out updated white papers to the SPOCS to let them know what changes are coming.
