Rockport BUDGET, formerly known as rBudget, is more than a rebrand. It’s the next step in building connected, intuitive tools for today’s commercial real estate (CRE) owner-operators.
In this video, Sean Fitzpatrick and Mary Osswald of rSquared share how Rockport BUDGET builds on the legacy of rBudget, offering CRE owner-operators a seamless, cloud-based platform for budgeting and reforecasting.
Now part of the Rockport product suite, Rockport BUDGET brings together streamlined workflows and trusted support, making day-to-day financial planning faster, easier, and more connected. Learn more: https://therockportgroup.com/products/rockport-budget
Our budgeting product is best in class. We've got integration with all the major accounting systems, Yardi, MRI, JD Edwards. It's designed for multiple types of users across an organization. Anything from your property managers to your accountants, your leasing team, your, engineers, they can all budget at the same time for the same building, which is a very unique component of our product. It integrates with accounting systems. We have tight integrations that allow you to refresh your data, your leasing data at your discretion.
And then you can also bring in your actuals. We allow you to overlay actuals against the budget so you can do proper reforecasting. We make the whole process much easier than, other solutions do. Ease of use is outstanding. We make full use of Excel where it makes sense. We can import Excel data; we can export Excel data. We've got our own financial report writer. You don't have to pay consultants to come up with new reports, create your own reports. So very extensible, very easy to use.
We have the industry's best integration with the accounting systems, and this brings a lot of efficiency to the table. Our implementation process for the budget product takes roughly four to eight weeks for the typical client depending on your size, depending on your availability of resources. That entails, couple of weeks of design sessions where we work with you after we stand up your first data set to decide of how you want your integration to go, how you want us to interpret your data as we bring it in from your accounting system.
From there, we go on to a testing mode where we make those changes. You would, you know, test it with us. We do a little training. We have a usually a core team from the client side that works directly with us. They learn the system as we go through this process. They become the trainers of their own teams, but we also provide training to all the end users if that's desired. We provide an administrator training as well at the end. And then for the first life cycle of your budget, so the first year, we are there with you helping you through the process.
If you can keep Mom-and-Pop happy and you can keep the biggest industrial and office clients on the planet happy, I think you got a good product. We are available for our clients. That's the number one thing. We're a small team, but we answer their questions. We answer as quickly as we can. They may not always love the answer we give them, but we are responsive. And I think that's a very important part of client service and of running a business. No client gets more of our time or services than another one.
If they want our help, we're there to help them. And it's a partnership. You know, that's the only way these things work. I think the ability to provide them with expertise they might have lacked, provide them with software that gives them quick answers, extensible answers, I think that brings a lot of value. We've worked with Hines for over 12 years. They have been very successful with the product. They continue to add properties in. They manage over eighty million square feet roughly in the budgeting product.
Every month, they're creating new reforecast models. They bring in their actuals. They're able to provide those reforecast numbers to the owners of the properties, whether that's Hines or their third-party managed properties. I think that the question becomes, when you're making a decision like which budgeting platform to use, you want to have things like speed, ease of use, extensibility, your ability to do custom, report writing, strong integration with the accounting systems. You basically have to be welded to the accounting systems. If there's any extra steps that are required, it's going to be a real detraction.
We've managed to build a budgeting system that is superior to the accounting systems' own internal products. And I think that says a lot when you can be a third-party piece of software and be superior to the actual accounting solution. I think you've accomplished quite a bit.