Real Estate Portfolio Management / Cost Administration / Cost Administrator

Cost Administration: Application Overview

The Cost Administration application enables you to organize, record, manage, and analyze detailed lease and real property costs. The application provides a wizard interface for entering costs as income or expenses, so that your Cost Administrator can record costs for leases whether your organization is the tenant or the landlord. You can associate costs with leases, buildings, properties, or accounts, so that you can record costs for each of these entities, including costs for buildings that you both own and occupy.

Once your costs are recorded, you can use them to generate chargeback and reports. For example, you can generate Cash Flow and Costs reports that include summary statistics to help you analyze your cost data.

As the Business Process Owner,you develop

Background data, such as data for geographic locations, using the Background Data task of the Lease Administration or Portfolio Management applications. See Manage Background Data.
Your cost classifications. See Define Cost Categories by Classes
Accounts if you want to chargeback costs to internal cost centers.
Indexes to generate indexed rent using a price index. See Defining Indexes.

As the Cost Administrator, you can:

Use the Cost Wizard to manage three types of costs associated with leases, buildings, properties, or accounts.See Cost Wizard Overview.
Generate indexed rent for a lease using any price index and a Lease Indexing Profile that simplifies the calculation of the indexed rent. See Lease Indexing: Overview.
For current FASB-13 compliance, ARCHIBUS provides the Straight-Line Rent report that calculates and compares straight-line rent adjustments with actual rent differential analysis. See Straight-Line Rent Report.

Generate CAM estimates and reconcile CAM costs. You enter a Common Area Maintenance (CAM) cost profile for a lease, that the application uses to generate CAM estimates. You can then enter CAM adjustments that reconcile CAM estimates and the actual costs the landlord incurs. See Adding a CAM Profile for a Lease. The CAM Reconciliation report enables both landlord and tenant cost administrators to analyze CAM cost performance. See CAM Reconciliation Report.

Generate reports, such as the Cash Flow, Base Rent Costs by Lease, Property Financial Summary, Lease Financial Summary, Property and Building Benchmarks, and Lease Benchmark reports. You can filter these reports by geographic location, specific cost categories to be included or excluded, and time frame. See Cost Administration Reports Overview.

After you approve the costs:

The Invoice Administrator can generate invoices if the costs are receivables. See Invoice Administrator.
The Chargeback Administrator can perform chargeback. See Chargeback Administrator.

Getting Started

Prior to using the Cost Administration application, your Lease Administrator or Portfolio Manager develops data for your leases, buildings, and properties using the Add/Edit tasks of the Lease Administration or Portfolio Management applications. See Add/Edit Overview.

Cost Administration When Using the ARCHIBUS Enhanced Global Feature Set

If you are using the ARCHIBUS Enhanced Global Feature Set, you add costs for your leases, building, properties or accounts using the Cost Wizard, just as is done when these features are not enabled. However,when the ARCHIBUS Enhanced Global Feature Set are enabled there are additional fields to work with. These fields enable you to view the breakdown for Base Costs (without VAT), VAT costs, and Total Costs in the Payment Currency or Budget Currency.

If you are using the ARCHIBUS Enhanced Global Feature Set, you perform these additional tasks:

Enable VAT and Multicurrency features. See Enabling/Disabling VAT and Multicurrency.
Define Conversion Rates. See Define Conversion Rate.
Define VAT Percent Values. See Define VAT Percent Values.

For more information, see:

See Also

Understanding Costs

Chargeback Administrator

Invoice Administrator

Cost Wizard Process