Resilient ERP for community housing

December 2024
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31
« Nov		Jan »

Published on the 09/09/2015 | Written by MYOB

AT A GLANCE

Compass Housing

INDUSTRY

Not for profit

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

Integrate disparate functions
To handle reporting and property control issues
Meet increasing requirements for its services

SOLUTION

MYOB Greentree suite

BUSINESS BENEFITS

All vital data is readily available in one place, enabling better reporting and decision-making
Tenancy details are directly linked to government systems, saving huge amounts of time in calculating rent incomes

FOR MORE INFORMATION

MYOB//
E: biggerbusiness@myob.com
NZ: 0800 696 239
AU: 1300 555 110
https://www.myob.com/

Subscribe to MYOB’s monthly bigger business newsletter.
MYOB Newsletter signup

Community housing by its nature requires a human touch; the right business system enables everyone involved to spend their time where it really counts and still be in control of systems and processes…

Organisations like Compass Housing Services Co Ltd play a vital role in helping the disadvantaged, and demand for its services is growing constantly.

Compass is Australia’s largest regionally-based community housing provider. This not-for-profit organisation provides social and affordable housing options to people in need. Its services include: housing for low to moderate income earners, as well as disability, supported, seniors and indigenous housing.

To handle its increasingly complex asset management and reporting requirements, Compass needed a high-performance business system.

“We wanted a system that was going to support us through the growth that we knew was coming,” explains Systems Accountant Jeanne Packer. “It had to be fully integrated, rather than a collection of smaller, disparate systems. Also, we didn’t want a solution that was only marginally better than what we had. Like a lot of industries, change can be hard to initiate in the community housing sector, so we didn’t want to have to change again in two or three years.”

Compass chose MYOB Greentree to meet its current and future needs.

A billion-dollar business
In 2014 Compass had 4,251 properties and $1.3 billion in assets under management. It derived $53.1 million in revenues. Its property portfolio is expected to double in size as the result of winning a joint bid for the Logan Renewal Initiative, the largest social housing revitalisation project in Australia’s history.

To meet growing demand for housing services, Compass has undertaken a series of mergers with similarly-minded housing providers, expanding from its Newcastle base into the wider New South Wales central coast and further north into Queensland.

“MYOB Greentree is going to be very important in backing our growth.”
Greg Budworth, Group Managing Director, Compass Housing

“Greentree is capable of scaling up – we’re talking about tens of thousands of extra properties,” says Compass’ Group General Manager, Greg Budworth. “Greentree is going to be very, very important in backing our growth.”

A system for dynamic change
Greentree provides an integrated, online, real-time housing system that manages properties, tenants, community engagement, maintenance and finance. It captures information regarding tenant demographics, sources and movements to support faster reporting to statutory authorities.

Jeanne says the creation of a single source of information has delivered major administrative improvements to the organisation. “Knowing that everything is in one system makes us want to put really good information in, so the system can give us back good quality, accurate information. It’s very flexible software that is really easy to manage. We’ve found it allows us to change and be very dynamic as a business.”

This flexibility is evident in Compass’ development of an automated Rent Review process within the housing system.

Direct linkage saves time
“Every six months, every community housing organisation in New South Wales is required to obtain income statements from tenants and this information is used to calculate rents,” Jeanne says. “With 4,000 tenants to deal with this can be a very tedious task, but it has a huge effect on our business and on the amount of money we invoice every week.”

In the past Compass staff would approach tenants for financial statements or seek consent to log in and obtain the income information from Centrelink, the tenancy payment service operated by the Australian federal government. The data was then put into Compass’ systems. The MYOB Greentree system has replaced this cumbersome process by being integrated directly with Centrelink. Compass now simply sends a file from MYOB Greentree to Centrelink and an online batch system retrieves the required income update.

“This saves us so much time every year,” says Jeanne. “We used to have eight or 10 people working fulltime for 10 weeks every six months to obtain this information. Now we are down to two people for four to six weeks instead and the calculation of tenant rents occurs in the background.”

Better data, better decisions
MYOB Greentree’s Payroll, Purchase Orders and Fixed Assets modules have also been added. Service Manager, including the contract management module, is being used to manage insurance and workplace health and safety obligations concerning suppliers and contractors.

“We’re also using Job Cost for just about everything,” Jeanne adds. “It allows us to have a mini profit and loss statement for each of our properties. We can slice and dice the information any way we like, which allows us to take a higher view and to make decisions about our portfolio.”

MYOB Greentree also offers an emergency response system. In early 2015, when storms lashed Australia’s central coast, it was used to send bulk SMS to tenants advising where to report and obtain support if they’d suffered property damage.

As Compass expands, so too does the need to monitor, and accurately report on its activities.

“From a chief executive point of view, you survive on data, and it needs to be in time and verifiable,” Greg concludes. “Greentree provides that right across the spectrum of the company’s activities and I think that’s the most important thing.”