It has been an extremely busy year since our last newsletter. BlockWise has been enhanced throughout the year. Our policy of free upgrades has meant that all our clients are using the latest version 25.9 and there is now an English version of the package called BlockWise which handles the billing in a different way.

Residential Block Management is a complex business and BlockWise has expanded to accommodate the various different ways people do things. There is now an option to bill a development by sending end of period statements instead of bills to date. Invoices can be sent out by email as can copies of old invoices. This feature has become widely used as it saves money on postage, especially when the client resides overseas.
It is now easier to implement BlockWise in your firm as we now provide a data input service which takes place before the initial implementation and training.
Those companies who have taken on our software over the past 3 years have all enjoyed a dramatic increase in their business and we feel the software has played a large part in these success stories.
We now at last have some spare capacity to take on new clients. We have to give a big thank you to the companies who have helped improve BlockWise over the first few years and indeed put up with the development phase. BlockWise is now a mature package and development now is more focused on connecting it to other systems; links for online-payments and insurance broker data transfer.

Two Stage Sales
BlockWise has always calculated expenditures on a pro-rata basis when a sale occurs. The problem was that the date of the sale can sometimes change. The Property Manager may not find out about the sale until much later or be informed that the date they were originally advised was wrong.
BlockWise now handles this by operating a two stage sale. An unconfirmed sale allows the new owner to be billed for their maintenance float and insurance. However there may be late expenditures still to arrive so the sale need not be confirmed until the period end. A Final Bill may be printed for the old owner at anytime during this period. The Final Bill includes full explanation so that the owner or the owner’s lawyer is well informed. This has greatly reduced the number of adjustments that have to be made when a property changes hands.
When a Property Manager finds out about a sale which occurred some time ago, i.e. more than one billing period, then BlockWise will calculate retrospective invoices for both owners. The new owner receives an invoice for their share to date and the old owner is credited with the expenditure he is not responsible for.

Proposed Developments and their Activation
When a new-build development is nearing completion there is a period before the Management Company take handover where there is a rather grey area over who should be paying for what.  In Proposed mode, BlockWise allows all the information to be loaded onto the system prior to the handover date. During this period Property Managers can correspond with the owners, they can receive payments and they can setup the owners’ accounts, but no expenditure is allowed until the handover date has been reached and the development has been activated.

Block Buildings Insurance
There are now facilities within BlockWise to collect Insurance Premiums. However an organisation must comply with the FSA rules on Insurance. BlockWise will do the accounting including the renewals invoices and allow for a refund on a sale of a property and will create a pro rata invoice for the new owner. This is a substantial addition to BlockWise and will require additional training to implement.

Documents
BlockWise has always had the facility to electronically file all outbound letters and invoices. The system now has an additional document facility where any document or image can be attached to a development. Some of our clients are scanning the property deeds and attaching them as well as insurance documents and development plans. All these documents can then be recalled from within BlockWise at the touch of a button. This removes the need to file a hard copy in a lot of cases. We have already made enormous in-roads in to the amount of filing that Property Management generates. Document attachment is yet another huge step forward.

E-mailing
BlockWise now has numerous email facilities. You can send copy invoices, job orders and statements by email just by looking them up. The email buttons only become illuminated if the email address is present so you know at a glance of the owner is contactable via email.

Accounts
BlockWise is adding flexibility to the way it can present accounts all the time. Originally BlockWise only worked on a Float / Deposit system. We have now added what we call the ‘Advance Demand’ method. This sends out a demand in advance and is based on a period budget which can be sent along with the demand. Expenditures are entered into BlockWise in the normal method, but instead of being apportioned to each owner they are put into a Profit & Loss account. This Profit & Loss account is then used to determine the budget for the next period. This method of billing is widely used in England and is becoming more popular in Scotland. BlockWise has the option to send invoices out as a statement at the end of the period or as an account to date.

Interfaces with other systems.
We have been asked to do a number of data import and exports. Let us know your requirements and we can create these. Whether it is online payments direct into the system or Insurance Agency import / export of data, these interfaces are all different and we would provide a quotation based on your specific requirements.