Accruent acquired Lucernex in 2017 to boost its IWMS or asset management portfolio. Lucernex Lease Administration & Accounting is a real estate lifecycle management platform emphasizing compliant financial contracts and accountancy.
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Yardi Voyager
Score 7.8 out of 10
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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.
I believe Accruent is well suited for companies with a large amount of leased assets that need to be accounted for under the new accounting standard. Companies with fewer leases would not need an intricate tool of this size. It is suited for both real estate and equipment leases, which makes up the entirety of our portfolio.
Yardi Voyager is well suited for any management company in the multifamily or commercial space and is a worthwhile competitor to other options in the space - MRI Software, Realpage, Resite, etc. For those med-large enterprises that value an intuitive and straightforward accounting and leasing system, and also work with other vendors that need to integrate with their ERP system, this is a great option. There is a large ramp-up time, requiring many company resources, and licensing is quite expensive, so this solution may not be for those companies with a small budget or personnel resources.
Lucernex does an excellent job of listening to its customers to continue enhancing the product to make it the best in the industry and to continue to partner with their customers on this endeavor.
Lucernex's product is an intuitive product that allows its end users to customize and manager their own fields and pages to tailor individual company's needs.
Yardi Property Management particularly excels at creating a system where it is easy to leave feedback for property managers because the data is available up front.
Yardi is also a useful tool at integrating property management across the entire platform. It can be used for asset management as well even for the most nitty gritty details.
It is also convenient to edit expenses inputted by the accounting department and managing those expenses forward for future budgeting.
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
I'm coming from the perspective of a fairly tech-adept person, so I didn't find the system too hard to learn. That said, I do feel some of the buried menus and the system's own internal search feature could use some improvement, but I have that feeling about the vast majority of CRMs I've ever used. There may be a little bit of a struggle to onboard/train up someone who isn't used to this sort of system, but once up and going it should be smooth sailing.
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.
The trainers were knowledgeable and engaging in presenting the materials, and their emphasis on important concepts was helpful (I would rate the trainers themselves a 9!). However, I do not believe there's anything we learned in the in-person training that could not have been taught via live web-classroom. Traveling a significant distance (in our case) to Austin, TX for only approx. 12 hours in the classroom was (in my opinion) not necessary, since the same material could have been presented via live web-classroom and saved us the expense and travel-time. I would encourage Lucernex to consider moving to a live web-classroom format in the future; an online live format would still allow for participation and questions from the participants while saving clients' time and money
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.
I cannot recall exactly what other products we reviewed before choosing Lucernex, but one of the leading factors was how highly customizable the software was. We had previously been using Retail Lease which was an older program with buckets of data stored everywhere. During the data mapping process, we were able to easily find a home for all of this "random" data
Onesite was broken, a lot. Yardi Voyager has been a much more stable platform. We have been operational for 3 years now and I cannot say that we have had any software downtime in 3 Years. But with Onesite, it was common to be down at least once a month for something that was not working correctly.
Lucernex was able to complete our business objective to manage and process all of our Lease Accounting entries within the software.
Lucernex has enabled all of our departments to become better connected, work together to create synergies and transparency to better meet business objectives.
