Hometown holdings increased their Net Operable Income by US$ 40,000 after automating property invoice management using Nanonets

Hometown Holdings, LLC, established in 2015, is a property management company headquartered in Virginia, USA. The company is led by owner Dustin Morris. Specialising in property management, Hometown Holdings offers services such as marketing and listing properties, tenant screening, lease preparation, maintenance, and financial reporting.

Their operations primarily span the state of Virginia with plans to expand to neighbouring areas. With under 50 employees and revenues in the range of US$ 1-5 Million, the company is recognised as one of the fastest-growing property management firms in the Roanoke Valley. They have a portfolio of 2500 property units under management across single-family, multi-family, commercial as well as retail segments.

1. Location: Virginia, United States of America
2. Year of Establishment: 2015
3. Leadership: Dustin Morris (Owner and CEO)
4. Industry: Real Estate
5. Number of Properties Managed: 2,500
6. Types of Properties Managed: Multi-Family, Single-Family, Commercial and Retail
7. Revenue: US$ 1-5 Mn.

As discussed previously, Hometown Holdings, LLC is a property management organisation. They primarily utilise Rent Manager as their property management software. One of the critical operational processes was handling the utility bills from various properties. Before we jump into the solution that Nanonets customised, we should look at the exact process that was followed at Hometown Holdings previously:

1. The utility bills were shared with Hometown Holdings over email in various formats and layouts.
2. The relevant data points were then manually entered into Rent Manager which is the property management software utilised by Hometown Holdings, LLC. The images of each utility bill also had to be uploaded alongside extracted data for record-keeping.

This process was manual and had to be budgeted into the team’s bandwidth. Needless to say, it was time-consuming, error-prone, and cost-intensive. It left little time for strategic tasks by employees. It needed to be optimised.

Nanonets understood the entire manual process and rose to the challenge of automating it. We ingest Invoices directly at the source, which is their email inbox, automatically extract the relevant data points, format them, and then export them into Rent Manager automatically mapping the invoice to the relevant vendor.

Let’s take a look at the automated process with Nanonets:

1. Import: Nanonets ingests the incoming invoices directly from the source, which is their email inbox by means of auto-forwarding.
2. Data Extraction: The AI-powered custom OCR model at Nanonets extracts the relevant data points from the invoices, such as, invoice number, date and amount along with the details of the vendor and the service for which the invoice has been generated.
3. Post-Processing and Mapping: The data then flows through a series of post-processing steps which remove unwanted characters, retain single instances of currency symbols, etc. There’s additional lookup fields added for simplifying vendor mapping within Rent Manager.
4. Approvals: There is an additional approval step in place that ensures all data points are extracted correctly with no oversight.
5. Export: The clean, formatted data is then exported and mapped into Rent Manager via API along with the original utility bill’s pdf file.

This is a solution which requires minimal human intervention from the team for data entry and optimises their bandwidth that allows them to focus on more strategic tasks.