How to enable users to report about rent incomes to project stakeholders?

Report­ing rent incomes is a cru­cial aspect of man­ag­ing a mul­ti-mil­lion project. Project man­agers need to have an accu­rate overview of rent incomes for a giv­en pay­ment peri­od, such as the cur­rent year, or for a cus­tom time frame, like Q1-Q2.

The design solu­tion enables users to fil­ter by select­ing a cus­tom date range using the time-peri­od but­ton. With the check­box fil­ters, users can also eas­i­ly view all out­stand­ing pay­ments, pro­vid­ing an overview of how much mon­ey is still owed by ten­ants. While an export fea­ture for the fil­tered selec­tion as an Excel sheet was fre­quent­ly request­ed for report­ing pur­pos­es, it was not includ­ed due to time constraints.

What’s the opti­mal default time peri­od for dis­play­ing rent pay­ments for any giv­en rent unit? 

We learned from cus­tomers that by default they want to see 1) ‘cur­rent pay­ment month’, 2) ‘next months’ and 3) ‘pay­ments from the recent past’.

This default view log­ic (‘6 most rel­e­vant months’) makes sense for active rents but isn’t applic­a­ble to all use-cas­es. When a rent is planned in the future or is even com­plet­ed, the 6 most rel­e­vant months are dif­fer­ent. E.g. a ten­ant in the future has no his­toric data to show and there is no ‘cur­rent month‘ that match­es with an exist­ing pay­ment. With this learn­ing we decid­ed to have dif­fer­ent default view set­tings for all rent sta­tus con­di­tions (planned, active, com­plet­ed) to always show the most rel­e­vant pay­ments to the user.

How to alle­vi­ate the bur­den of month­ly pay­ment con­fir­ma­tions for users?

An auto­mat­ic track­ing sys­tem using a bank­ing API was not fea­si­ble with­in the allo­cat­ed time for this ini­tia­tive. Through our dis­cov­ery phase, we found that 95% of cus­tomers pay their rent reli­ably. We learned, that our cus­tomers dis­liked idea of con­firm­ing pay­ments each month, pre­fer­ring to only engage with Alas­co when an issue aris­es (the remain­ing 5%). To address this, we designed a solu­tion where all pay­ments are auto­mat­i­cal­ly marked as “auto-paid” and users have the option to remove the sta­tus if some­thing is off. This change updates the planned with actu­al val­ues in the cash inflow, pro­vid­ing accu­rate liq­uid­i­ty plan­ning for project stakeholders.

How to record par­tial pay­ments pay­ments and its impli­ca­tions on liq­uid­i­ty planning?

In the major­i­ty (95%) of cas­es, rents are paid on sched­ule, while the remain­ing 5% can cre­ate plan­ning issues. These out­liers include ten­ants who either miss pay­ments entire­ly or pay only a por­tion of the amount due, par­tic­u­lar­ly when rent increas­es at the start of a new year.
To address this, users can set their own pay­ment dates. When an actu­al pay­ment date does not align with the planned date (e.g., March rent paid in April), the liq­uid­i­ty table will be updat­ed accord­ing­ly to pro­vide accu­rate data for all stakeholders.