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July 1, 2021 10:00AM

Managing Debt as an Investment With Yardi Debt Manager

For firms that have debt as an investment, Yardi Debt Manager—one potential connection component of Yardi Voyager—can service loans and process payments from borrowers, offering the transparency for all aspects of managing debt investments that Yardi users have come to expect and appreciate. Yardi Debt Manager is a part of the Yardi Investment Suite and offers many configurations and customizations to make your debt easy to manage and track.

What is Yardi Debt Manager?

Tracking investment debt is just as crucial to investment success as it is with any other type of investment, and Yardi Debt Manager offers the following benefits for those carrying debt investments:

  • Automate payments to lenders and billings to borrowers, and calculate service fees
  • Account for complex loan terms and amortization of fees
  • Track loan collateral (the underlying real estate—the property may already be being tracked in Voyager from a property management perspective), taxes, insurance, escrows, and capital reserves, and funded and unfunded interest rate reserves
  • Manage critical dates and covenants—access real-time dashboards that help clarify reporting requirements and critical information
  • Integrates with Yardi Voyager Property Management or Investment Accounting
  • Manage accounting tasks
  • Multi-currency capabilities

What can you track with Yardi Debt Manager?

With Yardi Debt Manager as part of your overall property management system, you’ll be able to track important information from investors, through the investment structure, to borrowers. It also helps you track even more important aspects of your business like attributes, scheduled charges, penalties, and payment restrictions. You can also add journal entries within Debt Manager to help track escrow balances. Yardi Debt Manager allows you to track conventional, draw loans, revolvers, letters of credit, intercompany, syndicated loans, and more. Automating the loan lifecycle will allow you to make more strategic decisions in the future. Here are some additional aspects of loans that you can track.

Track Loan Information

Being aware of loan information is essential to your business. It’s what drives the amortization schedule. With Yardi Debt Manager you can update the terms of the loan at any time, and the original terms are preserved so you can go back and look at them later if necessary. The Amortization Schedule can be built out to include various fees and scheduled charges as you set them up.

Better Visibility of Collateral

You can build out collateral—the properties associated with the loan—info from scratch or pull in property information from Voyager. You can also link properties that are associated with a different loan. This tracking aspect also includes the valuation, Net Operating Income (NOI), and occupancy percentage. This information is currently entered manually, but it likely will be automatable in the future.

Stay On Top of Covenants

Covenants on loans require borrowers to fulfill certain conditions or perhaps restrict certain actions. Covenants in Debt Manager are trackable as both receivables or payables, depending on your needs. You can set up a Reminder (or critical date) that allows you to assign the reminder to someone, set a status, and add notes. This can appear as a dashboard alert or as an email.

Better Borrower Reporting

Utilize Yardi’s standard and customizable reports to create borrower statements and gain better visibility into your debt portfolio.

Additional Info (Custom Fields)

Users can customize attributes to further define and sort loan portfolios. You can also make use of the secure document management features to maintain compliance for tax and insurance obligations.

Multi-currency

With Multi-currency selected in your database, you can track loans and investment structures in different currencies as well as track exchange providers by entity.

Why Is Debt Manager Important?

Now that you know what Debt Manager can do, you might be wondering how it can help your business. The bottom line: Debt Manager offers visibility, integration, and the ability to avoid manual spreadsheets. The system automates Form 1098 and 1098E reporting to both the borrower and electronic filing to the IRS. Anytime you automate your systems, you remove human error, mitigate risk, and give yourself the ability to make more strategic decisions. Loan Manager also tracks and pays property taxes and insurance on property and collateral, and automates escrow payment collection and reconcilement. Think of it as another subledger that is going to calculate and track the terms of your loans and produce financial information and data as a result of those calculations, which can then be reviewed from a financial reporting perspective. Big changes are on the way for Debt Manager, including an upgraded interface that matches other Elevate interfaces. This is a powerful product for anyone who invests in debt.

How we can help

With our expertise in all aspects of property management and Investment Accounting, we can help you set up and ensure all your collateral is properly linked. We can also work with you to establish custom fields that will allow you to generate the data and the reports you need to manage your debt investment successfully. With this service, there are some complex formulas at play to set up fees and scheduled charges, as well as properly code charges.

Previously two products, Yardi Debt Manager includes the previously separate Loan Manager product as well. Need more information about Yardi Debt Manager and how it can best serve your business? Contact us, and our experts will be happy to answer any questions you may have as well as help you integrate Yardi Debt Manager into your current system.