By Module

Forecasting

Cougar™ can forecast any contract type (lease, debt, or services), supporting all currencies and associated financial structures; tax, partnership, amortization etc. Cougar’s engines allow Asset Managers to generate forecasts by combining:

• Contract Information, (imported from the source property management systems, excel workbooks or manually entered),
• with Trend Information such as interest rates, exchange rates, and CPI
• with any type of Business Assumption such as renewal probability, down-time, and rent free period.
• (Prospective clients should note that the Type of Contracts, Trends and Business Assumptions are configured specifically for your organisational requirements off our default configuration.)

Unlike any other forecasting system available today, Cougar™ produces a full set of forward- looking financial statements (income statement, balance sheet and cashflow statement) for number of years into the future with the supporting details for each forecast year or period. This powerful forecasting engine and the resulting reports allows:

1. Asset managers to EFFICIENTLY generate and accurately produce multiple scenarios of forecasts
2. Fund managers to report on every aspect of their funds expected returns from the top (summarized levels of IRR or Cash Available for Distribution) drilled down to detailed ledgers
3. Shareholders and Investors to review anticipated performance, investment values  and cashflow distributions and contributions.

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Budgeting

Preparing the budget should be a collaborative exercise for key groups in the organisation - but it shouldn't be inefficient and take months of manual labor. The budget should be the financial result of the organisation’s short term business plans. Cougar allows the organisation to capture all necessary business drivers (from detailed units and leases to macro interest rates and inflation). Furthermore, Cougar is designed so that our clients’ Property Managers can work with their Asset Managers and other groups to contribute to a rich and useful financial business plan or budget. Our clients use Cougar to integrate into their accounting systems’ General Ledger and using advanced mapping of the GL to Cougar’s full detailed Chart of Accounts allows users to:

1. view actual results readily against budget 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 budget can be exported back into our client’s general ledger system.

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

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Valuation

Cougar™ can accurately value any series of cash flows, leases, unit, property or portfolio of properties. Valuations can be point-in time and rolling into the future. This way users can see the impact of future changes in risks on the valuation of their investments. This in turn allows for financial determination and analysis of IFRS required unrealised profits or losses on revaluation of investments.

Our default Cougar solutions, offer comprehensive solutions for both the Discounted Cashflow (DCF) and Direct Capitalization methods of valuation, with full transparency into how calculations are being performed.

In addition, Cougar™ ships with the ability to customize or create new valuation methodologies by modifying the underlying calculation rule-set. This is a unique feature which many of clients find invaluable since the global real estate market evolves and refinements to valuation techniques are on-going requirements.

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Investor Reporting

Facilitated by standard integrations with all major property management and accounting systems, combined with its forecasting capabilities, Cougar™ is the only solution that can seamlessly report a complex combination of performance, cashflow and balance sheet indicators on historical, actual, and forecast information.

Our default Cougar™ solution ships with over 200 report templates with critical industry reports such as Funds from Operations (FFO), Cash Available for Distribution (CAD), EBITDA, NOI, NAV, Coverage Ratios, Same Store Operations, Debt Analysis, Leasing Activity and Expirations, Portfolio Geographic Spread, Development Pipeline, Levered/Unlevered Returns and Top Twenty Tenants.

Additionally, using Cougar’s reporting Dashboard and Reporting functionality new reports can be created, customized and saved as public (available to everyone) or private.

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Performance Management

At Cougar we believe that the Performance Management cycle takes the form of these key cycles:

1. Information Gathering and Assumption setting
2. Review of Actual performance and statistics
3. Decomposition of variances from budget
4. Scenario planning

In order for these to be effective, the organisation need to define, numerically determine, model and report risk. Cougar’s V8 solution automatically breaks down and reports risk. These reports provide stakeholders (staff, management, investors and debt-providers) with essential tools to ANALYSE various levels of risk in their investments and portfolios including:

1. industry risk
2. geographical risk
3. tenant-specific risk
4. currency risk
5. interest rate risk
6. market price risk
7. lease roll-over risk
8. and importantly credit risk

This risk management process in turn facilitates optimal decision-making capabilities at various levels in the organization. Cougar™ delivers its performance management capabilities through Standard and On-Screen reports, and through an integrated Performance Dashboard. Standard reports are generated off of the Cougar Universe™, On-Screen reports are generated off of the live Cougar™ transactional database. Performance Dashboards are driven off of both. This dual source reporting strategy allows for real-time and analytical reporting without compromising performance. All reports allow for detailed analysis via drill down capabilities and variance reporting, facilitating exception-based management strategies to quickly and efficiently identify problem areas, identify root causes of  issues, and develop and execute resolution strategies.

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