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.

Typical workflow

A typical workflow for managing your lease and real property costs includes the following steps.

Before you begin

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

To add parcels, a Business Process Owner for costs, can add parcel for existing properties using the Manage Parcels task or the Add / Edit Wizard. See Managing Parcels.

Step 1: Develop validating background data.

If you have not already developed background data for your locations for which you are tracking costs, you can do so using the Lease Administration or Portfolio Management applications. See Manage Background Data.
Develop cost classifications used for rolling up costs for reporting and chargeback. See Define Cost Categories by Classes.
Develop accounts if you want to charge back costs to internal cost centers. See Define Accounts.
Define price indexes if you want to generate indexed rent cost records using a price index. Defining Indexes and Lease Indexing Overview.
Define action item types for taxes and configure them to appear in the Cost Administration application. See Define Action Types for Taxes. The application comes with predefined TAX action types, but you can add additional ones if needed.

Step 2: Enter and manage costs using the Cost Wizard.

You can work with any combination of recurring, scheduled, or actual costs that meets your reporting needs. You can add these costs for properties, parcels, buildings, leases, or accounts. See Cost Wizard Overview.

Step 3. Approve scheduled costs once they are verified.

See Approving scheduled costs

Actual costs are required if you want to generate chargeback, or issue invoices for the costs. This is done using the Cost Chargeback and Invoicing application. See Cost Chargeback and Invoicing: Application Overview

Step 4. Optionally, track the following:

Add or review important tax actions for a property or parcel for a specific date range. By searching on the Date Required, you can review any overdue tax actions that may need immediate attention. See Manage tax actions.
Generate indexed rent using any price index and a Lease Indexing Profile. See Lease Indexing: Overview.
Add taxes for parcels associated with land. See Viewing and recording tax expenses.
For current FASB-13 compliance, generate 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 based on a CAM Profile, and reconciles CAM costs. The CAM Reconciliation report enables both landlord and tenant cost administrators to analyze CAM cost performance. See Managing Common Area Maintenance Costs (CAM): Overview

Step 5: Review and analyze costs, compare portfolio items using benchmark reports, or analyze a high-level summary of your costs.

See Cost Administration Reports: 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:

For more information, see: