We recently caught up with Matt Berlin, CFO for Paragon Real Estate Investments, for perspective on the drivers and results of implementing new accounting software for managing real estate investments. Matt, what is Paragon’s business focus? We’re a privately held company that manages and invests funds on behalf of family offices, institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals. We manage our growing portfolio of stabilized assets through our flagship fund, Paragon Real Estate Fund. The Paragon team is based in La Jolla, Calif., and owns commercial property in key urban markets nationwide. What challenges did you face in your real estate investment operations? As our investor base grew significantly, we found that doing property accounting manually on spreadsheets was cumbersome, time-consuming and mistake-prone. That prompted us to seek a new software solution capable of streamlining journal entries, general ledger updates, distributions and other investment operations. Then you adopted Yardi Investment Accounting. What did that do for you? It automated our asset, investment accounting and investment lifecycle within a single connected solution. Yardi Investment Accounting is the only one-stop shop I’ve seen in the market. What results have you seen from the implementation? The solution produces faster reporting, helps us formulate our investment strategies, satisfies investors and enables full transparency from investors through assets. Its seamless integration with Yardi Voyager means we don’t have to worry about mistakes from manually entering data into spreadsheets or whether disparate systems can communicate with each other and make the various general ledgers match. Investment Accounting also streamlined our annual net asset value calculations by automatically incorporating the current share price. Can you cite an example of Investment Accounting’s utility? When we executed a capital call, we didn’t need to set up new spreadsheet formatting. We no longer needed to open...

Amanda Smeltzer, executive director at Banyan Living, reports, “Yardi Resident Screening streamlines our screening process with easy to read reports and automatic renter approvals. The solution makes life easy for our staff, while it provides convenience for our customers.” As part of our mission to keep delivering solutions that help our Yardi clients succeed, enhancements to the popular Yardi Resident Screening module were recently released. Clients already know that approving quality residents automatically as part of their leasing workflow with Yardi Resident Screening saves time and money. Now, the system includes even more features to help clients not only easily select low risk residents who improve their bottom line, but also get more detailed analytics about individual applicants, local area renters and overall property performance. Single sign-on and better UI: now with a single sign-on from Yardi Voyager, a fully responsive UI and an enhanced Executive Dashboard, clients can work more quickly, access needed data instantly and navigate the entire system with greater ease. Fee Manager functionality: a new “fee manager” compatibility feature conveniently shows all of a fee manager’s Yardi Resident Screening analytics under one account, even if they operate from multiple owners’ Voyager databases. Criminal conviction details and improved accuracy: when an applicant is rejected based on the criminal background check, the system now provides detail about the type of conviction(s) that resulted in the rejection. And to continue to ensure and improve accuracy, applicant middle names will be required for all screenings starting in early 2017. New reports and deeper insight: to make the daily lives of property managers and owners easier than ever, more reports are available, and a new property performance feature provides a snapshot of application volume and demographic information. And to discover which local employers provide the...