What Yardi and MRI don't cover on the spend side

Any property business that already runs property management software like Yardi or MRI Software has probably solved some of the biggest operational challenges. With either one, its finance teams can easily manage leases, rent rolls, accounting records, asset information, and financial reporting from one central platform.

The fact that you are here means that you are responsible for spend management for a real estate group and are facing a very specific issue: having to manage spend from shared corporate cards, paper receipts from site staff, WhatsApp messages, and reimbursement claims manually.

This guide shows you how to address this issue without replacing the platform your teams are already comfortable with.

What Yardi Voyager and MRI Software are actually built for

Yardi Voyager and MRI's property management software are the gold standard when you want a platform that can help you manage your property portfolio. Depending on your implementation, these software platforms can manage:

• Property accounting
• Lease administration
• Rent roll management
• Tenant billing
• Asset registers
• Maintenance records
• Financial reporting
• Portfolio-level performance reporting and more.

In short, these systems function as the financial backbone of any organisation that manages a portfolio of properties. That said, it's also essential to recognise that this is where their capabilities naturally end.

Why these platforms don't help with spend management

Platforms like Yardi Voyager and MRI don't help with spend management because employee spending follows a completely different workflow from property accounting. Unlike the latter, which has a lease or supplier invoice already recorded in the ERP, employee spending begins when someone working at a property needs to spend money, which requires:

Issuing cards to site and facilities teams

Property managers, engineers, facilities supervisors, and maintenance teams regularly make purchases while away from the office. Neither platform is built to issue individual corporate cards with predetermined limits for such spending. As a result, teams default to sharing one card across several people or several properties, which makes reconciliation after the fact difficult.

Capturing receipts where the spend happens

Voyager or MRI do not have the functionality to capture receipts at the moment of a purchase: an issue several user reviews on software review platforms such as Capterra continue to highlight. Will the receipts do end up in the system? It happens only after someone has spent time following up on the paperwork through multiple channels.

Approving before money leaves rather than reconciling after

Most property accounting systems excel at recording transactions accurately after they happen. Ideally, questions like: "Does the employee have approval to spend?" and "If so, should the purchase happen, and is it within the budget?" should be answered beforehand. Most property management systems can't implement this.

Managing petty cash and site allowances

Not every little spend justifies issuing a corporate card or raising a purchase order. This is why many purchases still rely on petty cash, temporary site floats, or fixed allowances for their day-to-day operational spending. This is yet again a workflow that falls under the purview of petty cash management software and is not something Yardi or MRI was designed to manage.

What teams do instead, and what it costs

In the absence of a dedicated workflow for managing employee spend, the process usually ends up following one or more of the following paths:

• A shared corporate card gets passed between multiple site managers.
• Receipts have to then be collected through several follow-ups, either via email or  WhatsApp.
• Staff members submit reimbursement claims after paying suppliers personally.

This leaves your finance teams spending days identifying which property each expense belongs to manually. In the absence of a dedicated tool, it means that all of this is now being done on a spreadsheet.

Over time, this creates a second, unofficial expense management process running alongside the property system. Being a manual process, it also increases the likelihood of missing receipts, incorrect property coding, duplicate data entry, and delayed month-end reporting.

What stays in your property platform, and what belongs beside it

That begs the question, "How do you fix this?" The short answer is your property platform remains your financial system of record. The table below shows what should stay in it and what a dedicated spend platform should handle alongside it.

What to look for in expense software that integrates with Yardi or MRI

Here are a few questions to evaluate a spend management solution if you're considering adding one alongside Yardi or MRI software:

Can it export data easily into Yardi or MRI?

The expense software that integrates with Yardi or MRI should be able to push coded transactions directly into their general ledger without needing manual CSV import every month.

Can it preserve your entity and property structure?

The solution in question should be able to carry the correct entity, property and cost centre into your ledger the way it is currently set up.

Does it support multiple entities without creating separate workflows?

If your portfolio runs through several SPVs, the tool needs to handle that natively rather than forcing a workaround for every new entity.

Is the data in the right shape for the ledger before it ever reaches finance?

The system should ideally have AI receipt scanning built in that can capture vendor, amount, date, and VAT details at the point of purchase automatically.

Summing it up

Property management software like Yardi and MRI is designed to manage properties, and they remain among the strongest systems for those functions. That said, these platforms lack modern spend capabilities. The most effective way to fill this gap is to complement it with a spend management solution.

Alaan fits alongside existing property management software and captures the right information at the point of spend and passes clean, complete data into the accounting system seamlessly.

Book a demo with Alaan to see how.

FAQs

Does property management software include expense management?

Most property management software does include accounting functionality and records expenses in the general ledger. However, employee spend management is often handled through dedicated expense management software.

How does expense software integrate with Yardi or MRI?

Most expense platforms export approved and coded transactions into the accounting system using standard integrations or accounting exports. This allows finance teams to manage employee spending separately while maintaining accurate financial records within their property management platform.

Do property companies need a separate expense management system?

Not every business needs a separate expense management system. Organisations that manage multiple properties, entities or site teams usually benefit from one.

What does it cost to add expense management software?

The cost to add expense management software varies by provider and is dependent on the size of your portfolio. However, the better question to ask here is if the ongoing cost of the current workaround is more than what a dedicated solution would cost you.

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