Real Estate Budgeting

A real estate budget should be the financial result of the organization’s short term business plans. Preparing a realistic real estate budget should naturally be a collaborative exercise for key groups in an organization. The process should not be inefficient or take several months of manual labor. Cougar allows an organization to capture all necessary real estate business drivers from detailed units and leases to macro interest rates and inflation. Cougar is designed so our clients’ Property Managers can work with their Asset Managers and other groups to contribute to a rich and useful financial business plan or real estate budget. Our clients use Cougar to integrate into the General Ledger of their accounting system. Using advanced mapping of the General Ledger to Cougar’s full detailed Chart of Accounts allows users to:

1. View actual results readily against real estate budgets at any level of detail (including transactional detail)
2. Easily adjust actuals with new assumptions and expectations to create rolling budgets with most current and up-to-date financial data
3. After reporting and approval, the Cougar created real estate budget can be exported back into our client’s general ledger system.

Cougar databases retain and lock the full history of upload actuals. Our clients’ real estate budgets are therefore prepared using the latest available data. Importantly, during the budget season, Cougar allows users to easily refresh and reforecast data so the review process is seamless. Cougar drills into microscopic detail for detailed recoveries and end-of-year reconciliations. Key items necessary for complete budgeting and analysis of real estate investments include

• below-the NOI line items,
• all levels of debt service and,
• other abnormal or preferred stakeholder payments.

Cougar’s easy to use User Interface allows the users to accommodate detailed percentage rental projections, management fees, and multiple debt layers.