FAQ

How many buildings may I run on one subscription?

A separate subscription is required for each building or office complex (if the expenses are consolidated).

What level of escalation theory is needed to use the software?

The program assumes that the user has a basic knowledge of escalation theory. Our companion publication, The Escalation Handbook for Office Buildings©, sold through the BOMA store. It’s a great tool for both the novice and seasoned professional.

The handbook contains in-depth explanations of escalation theory, including gross-ups, expense caps, capital expenditures, and tenant audits, plus more than 30 pages of real-world escalation questions and answers drawn from our BOMA-sponsored escalation webinars. The handbook is also useful when defending your calculations in the event of a tenant audit.

What types of reports can I generate?

Want to know what percentage of actual expenses the landlord recovers? The AOE dashboard automatically updates important information and gives you a snapshot.

The software generates reports to distribute to your tenants and an impressive array of reports for property staff, asset management and ownership to review and approve escalation invoices.

Individual tenant reports include escalation invoices and cover letters (enabling the property manager to explain any unusual items); an expense cap calculation report showing the detail for each expense cap; and a tenant expense summary detailing the escalatable amounts for each broad expense category (e.g. admin, R&M, utilities, etc.). View a sample tenant report.

Property management reports include summary and detailed reports for each expense pool, a 3-year comparison of expenses (including percentage changes and PSF amounts), detailed tenant billing summaries; gross-ups; capital amortizations, escalation rent roll, and other reports that help you manage escalation recoveries. View a sample management report.

BOMA’s logo is displayed on all reports and reflects their support of our industry-accepted methodology used throughout the software. This methodology is drawn from The Escalation Handbook for Office Buildings©.

What’s involved with the initial set-up?

The initial set-up has two components:

• First, you must enter or import EXPENSE data. This includes your chart of accounts and annual expenses, gross-up info and CapEx jobs, and creating the different expense pools. Once in the system, this data is easy to maintain going forward.
• Then, you enter your RENT ROLL data. Each tenant’s escalation terms are defined in the lease’s operating expense clause. These must be abstracted and loaded into the program using our lease-profile template, which lists all of the fields needed to properly invoice each tenant. Using a completed template, a single tenant’s information can typically be loaded into AOE within one or two minutes. Lease data automatically carries forward each year until expiration. Thereafter, all that is required is to input new leases or changes that occur within the year (e.g. expansions, contractions, early terminations, etc.). We recommend entering leases as they occur throughout the year, which will make the year-end billing process very quick and easy.

Can I create extra versions of my building’s data to use for "What If Analyses" or to back up prior budgets?

New buildings will be created with a single database, but you can create additional copies for the purpose of creating snapshots of building information as well as for preserving budget information for later comparison. You might have a primary building called MainBldg and you could also have MainBldgBackup or MainBldg2 with the ability to copy between them.