Civida is Edmonton’s largest provider of community and affordable housing, managing more than 5,300 homes across 130 sites and supporting over 15,000 tenants. As a nonprofit, their mission is to provide safe, affordable housing while building stronger, more resilient communities through innovative programs, renewal projects, and partnerships.
The Challenge
Big Mission. Outdated Tools.
As a nonprofit, managing financial resources is critical especially during times of inflation and high vendor costs.
Civida closely monitors its budget and forecast for each one of the 1420+ sites on a monthly basis, with the Finance and Property Management teams working together as a united team.
As Civida continues to grow in sites and tenants, expanding their impact in the province, their leadership identified a need to streamline the budgeting and forecasting process by automating steps that can save significant time and energy.
The Solution
Custom Built Forecasting.
Pontem Innovations created a customized Forecasting Tool that automatically pulled data from Yardi, their off-the-shelf property management system. The tool enabled the Property Managers to enter forecasted amounts by GL code, for the remaining months of the fiscal year. It has the flexibility to straight-line the remaining budget or input the one-time expenses in the month it’s expected to be incurred.
The Impact
Faster. Smarter. Stronger
Civida saved a lot of time from no longer having the Finance team Property Management team pull 3 Yardi reports per site per month (upwards of 80 reports per month). The Finance team has empowered Property Managers with a modernized tool built on the Power Platform to input forecasts, with the data stored in a database rather than large spreadsheets prone to human error. When changes needed to be made on the forecast, it became much easier to do, with the impact to the site’s budget, the division’s budget and the whole organization’s budget, being automatically apparent in a robust dashboard.
This new time and energy can now be spent analyzing and strategizing on how to help Civida’s beneficiaries more, instead of tinkering with the data. Building capacity leads to empowered teams, and brighter ideas for the future.
Confidence at Every Level.
Minimizing errors and being more efficient are the obvious benefits, but this digital asset also meant Civida built the resiliency as a team in case of turnover.
With forecasting transformed, Civida is now turning to Executive and Board Reporting, confident that customized tools can continue to deliver accuracy, efficiency, and capacity to better serve their 15,000 tenants.