Jennings & Barrett are award-winning dedicated block and estate management specialists with over 40 years of experience and are a leading force in the London and South-East property market. Joanna Bould, one of the owners of the company and accounts manager, Justina Danielyte provide some details as to why they use Blocks Online.
The challenge
Joanna comments:
“Jennings and Barrett decided that they needed specialist software that would:
- Allow them to expand their management portfolio
- Provide access for leaseholders to view their own service charge account and raise building faults or other enquiries
- Was accessible for all staff with a pleasant user interface and great customer service.”
Justina adds:
“I and my accounts team had some specific areas we wanted to address including being able to save time and effort in the posting of leaseholder receipts, accessing supplier invoices and dealing with payment runs which can be quite time consuming in having to check the funds in the bank before the payment can be confidently processed as well as manually ticking every invoice we wanted to pay.”
The solution
Joanna states:
“After much consideration of various options on the market, Blocks Online was selected. The accounting is robust, compliant and provides for automation of standard processes. The cloud access simplified access for staff and reduced the cost for duplicate Microsoft licencing, which was required by our previous software solution.”
Justina says:
“The Blocks Online system enables us to upload receipts directly from our banking records, every supplier invoice is uploaded and attached to the transaction and there is an automated payment run where the system recognises the funds in the bank account and produces the report of invoices available for payment.”
The outcome
Joanna comments:
“The cost of the system was lower than our previous software, customer service was accessible and reactive. Jennings and Barrett use the software system as a feature when they draw up a proposal for a potential new management and it is one of the tools that our new clients say they value.
In the year since introducing the Blocks Online software to the business, we have grown our portfolio by circa 1500 units to 4,500 units under management.”
Justina adds:
“Uploading receipts directly from our banking records has saved us a lot of time which we previously spent on recording every receipt individually and manually, the process now takes only a couple of minutes and truly increased our efficiency.
Supplier invoices are easily accessible and easy to amend if needed and the Blocks Online software provides us with a more efficient process of settling supplier invoices and producing remittance advices.”
