May, 2022 | Advanced Communities

Effective Management of Residential Rents and Voids in Salesforce with AC Housing

Posted on May 27, 2022August 24, 2023 by Stas Dunayev

There are many Housing Associations and Property management companies, globally, that manage Social Housing, Commercial and Domestic tenancies. Many of these organisations exceed portfolios of 1000 properties and some beyond 10,000! The complexities associated with day to day operations can be high including; handling queries from tennants, managing rental payments, arrears and voids in addition to the significant document processing needs. Any mistake in the workflow process can lead to a significant loss for the organisation. Therefore it is so important to have a powerful modern solution for rent management that can help you automate processes and ensure compliance.

Most current tools solve single issues, whether it is voids, arrears management or payment allocations, etc. That is why we have created AC Housing – an all-in-one complete solution for housing management, fully native to Salesforce.com – the No.1 leading Cloud CRM platform. AC Housing provides a 360-degree view of properties and tenants, rent accounting, voids and arrears management, and much more, providing comprehensive data for advanced analytics. Being a Salesforce.com application means that security, scalability and adaptable workflow processing is made easy through simple Salesforce configuration, Not Code!

Rent Management

Our Rent Management features allow you to see all tenants as well as their rental agreements, voids, arrears, and payments. In addition, you can check the status of each account receivable, such as “new”, “paid”, or “partially paid”. Account receivables that are not paid on time are marked as outstanding and notified to you as the property manager. You can monitor all information in one place, accessible on both desktop and mobile.

Arrears Management

With hundreds or thousands of properties, it can be hard to track all payments or more important those missing payments! One of the most crucial things in housing management is to detect arrears quickly and start to the contact process with tenants to help them resolve matters, avoiding larger debts building and of course preventing legal pursuit and larger losses being incurred.

With AC Housing, you can control the process of working with the tenant who has overdue rent payments. Each step has automated processes, such as sending mailings or reminders, to minimise the manual work associated with tenant notifications. Also, a set of tasks created to be performed by housing association managers – for example, to call or visit tenants, or even take some pre-court or court actions.

So using AC Housing you are able to react to potential payment problems at an early stage which will decrease the number of rent arrears cases with big rent overdue. And on the other hand, your tenants will always be aware of required payments and the situation with obligations under the rent agreement.

Voids Management

Voids are periods of time when properties are left empty between tenancy agreements. And each landlord knows how much work needs to be done before the next tenant moves in. It’s important to use this time effectively to run all necessary checks like electrical, gas safety, ventilation, cleaning and inventory checks, as omissions in the process cause delay and potential lost income.

With our application, you will have the opportunity to see and control all stages of the void management process, so you can understand the status of each property and the associated tasks, which are created automatically according to your organisation’s void management workflow. These workflow processes are fully configurable and so can flex as needs change. The images below also show the cost management associated with managing the void process.

The image below shows Void projects or jobs in a KanBan style view so you can view the overall progress of this work type and where issues may occur in terms of deadline management.

Dashboards with Statistic Data

It’s very important for management and executive teams to understand the overall ‘health’ of the operation in order to aid decision making and respond potential pressures. AC Housing provides you with wide-ranging reports and dashboards that are fully customisable. You can see how many properties are empty at this moment, the rented vs empty property ratio, the overall outstanding amount, new arrears arose last week, paid arrears last week, overdue rent of tenants by days/weeks/months, upcoming voids, all voids by each stage, your loss from the void process by monthyear.

As you can see, AC Housing is an intuitive solution that empowers you with a wide range of tools needed for successful housing management.

Salesforce Experience Cloud benefits: All You Need to Know

Posted on May 23, 2022July 1, 2024 by Anna Babur

If you want to keep up with your competition and expand by optimizing your company operations and strengthening your web presence, consider upgrading from obsolete technologies to newer ones as soon as possible. You can use the Salesforce Experience Cloud platform to develop next-generation strong digital experiences to interact with the people who are important to your organization, improve sales, offer world-class service, market, and manage your content. Continue reading to learn more about Salesforce Experience Cloud’s competitive advantages and how they support Salesforce community management.

What is the Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly known as Community Cloud) is a DXP platform with an integrated set of technologies and out-of-the-box solutions that allows you to create and manage beautiful community experiences easily and fast. Experience Cloud lives in the Salesforce platform, ensuring advanced security features and seamless system performance.

With Experience Cloud, you can create multiple websites inside your organization for different purposes to meet all of your business needs and goals.

By creating a partner portal (PRM), connect your sales teams, improve your partner relationships, ensure effective collaboration and channel management;
With a marketing site, build connections with your customers and keep them engaged with your company;
Opting for the self-service cloud customer community, provide strong community engagement and ensure better interaction between customers, experts, and partners;
Create a help center to deliver exceptional customer service and support by giving your customers one place to get answers to all their questions;
Experience Cloud microsite or landing page is a powerful promotional tool and a sure-fire way to generate leads for a new product launch or an upcoming event.

Key Questions To Consider When Implementing a Support Portal on the Salesforce Experience Cloud

This questionnaire is specifically designed for companies looking to build a support portal on Experience Cloud but are unsure where to begin. It addresses the critical aspects of setting up and configuring a Salesforce self-service portal on Experience Cloud, ensuring a robust infrastructure tailored to your unique community requirements.

Why choose Experience Cloud: key benefits

You may ask yourself: “What are the advantages of using Salesforce Experience Cloud, and why should I use it in my business”?

With the Experience Cloud platform, you can create branded, feature-rich, and user-friendly Salesforce sites for different purposes: boost sales, deliver exceptional customer service, promote your products & services and engage with the customers. This platform is highly configurable and flexible so that you can easily adjust your website to meet all of your business needs.

Implementing Salesforce site is an excellent choice if looking for a comprehensive solution to streamline key business processes and enhance team collaboration. It has many more advantages and features that we’ll highlight in this part of our article.

Salesforce Experience Cloud and its benefits:

A wide variety of solutions. With Experience Cloud, you can create, customize and maintain different company communities specifically tailored to your audience and business needs;
Maximized flexibility and customization. Thanks to Experience Builder, Experience Cloud communities development has become even easier, streamlined and fast. By using layouts and templates, themes, standard and custom components, as well as personalization options, you can build a productive, successful site;
Third-party integrations. You can enhance your Salesforce community functionality with various third-party components and applications available on AppExchange, the leading cloud marketplace. For instance, you can use a powerful Advanced Communities Salesforce event management app to enhance your productivity, streamline event creation, community management and analytics;
Efficient content management. With Experience Cloud CMS you don’t need to duplicate your content to deliver it to all of your sites. You can reuse the content you’ve already created by setting up connections to bring content from your external CMS into the particular site.

Salesforce Summer '23 Release: Most Exciting Features for Experience Cloud

In this blog post, the Advanced Communities team covers the Salesforce Summer '23 Release and what new features are introduced for Experience Cloud. Read our blog to find out what’s new in Salesforce Summer Updates 2023.

Key features

A bunch of Experience Cloud benefits and cool features make this platform so efficient in terms of business organization and management. Let’s go through some of the most important among them.

Customer 360 concept. With Salesforce Customer 360, you create a single view of a customer’s data available on one integrated CRM platform for each department of your company. It helps you offer and deliver personalized Salesforce experiences your customers expect, build efficient engagement strategies, and make better forecasts and predictions;
AppExchange enhancements. You can find, download and install various software apps and configurable components to empower your customers’ experiences. For example, AC MemberSmart, a membership software for associations, provides member organizations and associations with all they need to organize and manage their activities. With the Salesforce knowledge management application, you can build and manage your Salesforce Knowledge Base effectively;
Mobile-friendliness. Experience Cloud sites are optimized to be functional and visually pleasing on devices of different sizes, which ensures customer satisfaction and improves customer retention;
Analytics all in one place. Using Experience Cloud, you can get and sort all the data you need to create reports and dashboards in order to track and analyze your business progress.
No code building. Creating beautiful, feature-rich and engaging digital experiences with Experience Cloud doesn’t require the ability to code. All sites are built with the Builder, a drag and drop experience builder tool. The creation of websites has never been easier and faster than now!
Salesforce native solution. One of the biggest Salesforce pros for Experience Cloud sites is its advanced security level and strong protection from unauthorized access. All the data processing occurs within the Salesforce instead of on 3rd party servers;
One hundred different sites on one org. You may have up to 100 different active, inactive or preview experiences within one Salesforce organization.
SEO & Tracking. You can track page views of your public Experience Builder site and make it visible to search engines if needed by setting up search engine optimization.

Data Access & User Permissions in Experience Cloud Sites

As organizations continue to adopt Salesforce's Experience Cloud, it becomes increasingly important to understand the various tools and techniques available for managing user permissions and data access within the platform. In this article, we will explore the concepts of permission sets and profiles, and provide you with best practices for securing your site and managing data access.

How can it help your business?

You don’t have to be a large firm to benefit from adopting Experience Cloud for your business. It’s a fantastic option for a variety of businesses, including for-profit and nonprofit organizations from a variety of sectors. You’ll undoubtedly discover the finest option for you!

With Experience Cloud, you can create and support portals that streamline self-service, build customer connections, improve partner satisfaction and boost revenue. You have a wide range of solutions to choose from to fit your specific business needs;
You can also extend business processes to partners and customers and simplify every step of your channel sales process by providing them with everything they need to make selling faster and easier;
By using AppExchange configurable apps and components, you can enhance the functionality of your experiences when your business grows and scales;
You can be lightning-fast with delivering your content across all channels. Salesforce CMS allows you to build content in one place and have it anywhere;
Create and customize feature-rich and visually pleasing online spaces that look great on every device easily and fast with the Experience Builder tool;
When it comes to cloud platform security, no one place is better protected than Salesforce. By creating your site with Experience Cloud, you ensure a high level of security and strong protection of your data against unauthorized access.

Final word

Experience Cloud is all about speeding up implementation, time reduction, strong customer engagement, enhanced security, increased productivity, effective business management and collaboration. Learn more about the benefits of Salesforce Experiences on our website.

If you are about to get started with Experience Cloud, our Salesforce experts are always ready to help you! Contact us for more information and detailed consultation.

Salesforce Event Applications: The Ultimate Comparison

Posted on May 13, 2022May 27, 2024 by Stas Dunayev

Salesforce Event Management App Comparison: What’s the Difference between Apps?

If you’re in charge of organizing events for your company, you’re aware of the frequent issues and mistakes that will inevitably arise. That is why having the correct tools on your side is critical. The appropriate event management system is critical whether for non-profits, commercial, or governmental organizations since it may increase opportunities, save time, improve all processes, offer comprehensive data, and provide many other benefits.

What are the main tasks of the Salesforce event tools?

Event tracking

Full tracking of past and upcoming events, their locations, attendees, and collecting all these data in one place.

Time-saving

With the right tool, you can actually automate and optimize most of the processes, such as event creation, registration, payments, etc. It can help to save time for both admins and users.

ROI controlling

Reports and dashboards are created utilizing event data. You may assess and enhance future events based on information such as the number of participants, package sales, most popular events, registrations, revenue comparisons, and other indicators.

Marketing efforts

Events are a very powerful tool for marketing efforts and clients’ segmentation. It’s also possible to set up integration with Marketing Cloud and get the maximum from its functionality.

One of the most important aspects of effective EMS is that it is native to your CRM, allowing you to gather leads, examine data, and do analytics all in one system.

Overview of Salesforce Event Management Market

Let’s overview the most popular EMS with their benefits and disadvantages:

AC Events Enterprise

An ultimate application for event management. 100% native to Salesforce tool that allows you to manage all kinds of in-person and online activities: from short seminars to multi-day conferences. This app integrates with Zoom to let your users attend online events, Stripe to make secure online payments, Google Calendar to add events to the calendar on their devices, and Google Maps to check and find the event location.

The pricing starts at $500 USD per company per month. Discounts or special deals are available for non-profits

Unlimited free trial period on sandboxes.

Blackthorn

Blackthorn Events is a web-based event management software designed to help businesses plan, register, invite, run, and report all in Salesforce for both virtual and in-person events. With this app, you can create free or paid events, manage events budget and expenses, create recurring events, and many other features.

The pricing starts at $875 USD per org per month. 501(c)3 nonprofits receive a 10% discount.

Unlimited free trial period on sandboxes.

Fonteva

Fonteva Events is a native to Salesforce events management software for Salesforce users. Assemble lets you manage all your events, large or small, free or paid. It’s fully featured to serve Startups and Agencies. This app allows you to create and manage multi-day conferences with multi-tracks and multi-sessions.

The pricing starts at $8400 USD per company per year.

No free trial

Now let’s take a closer look at a few important features for any EMS:

Dynamic Band Pricing. For most types of events, it’s important to be able to set up various prices for users based on different criteria. For example, if you organize an event for multiple regions you can create a separate band for each of them and assign different prices based on location. So users from different regions will see different prices. Having this functionality gives you a lot of flexibility in setting up prices based on various criteria. This feature is available in AC Events Enterprise, but absent in Blackthorn and Fonteva Events.

Complex Questionnaires with Native Salesforce Flows. There are so many things that event organizers should take into account when preparing for events. And collecting the right information from attendees can be a very important thing that helps a lot. Using Salesforce Lightning flows you can set up questionnaires of any complexity with branching logic. It allows you to create various registration flows depending on users’ answers. For example, you can add a question about Covid vaccination. If the user answers that he has a vaccination certificate flow will direct him to an offline event registration form, if he hasn’t – he will be invited to join the event online. It’s absolutely flexible and you can set up any flows that will meet your requirements. This feature is available in AC Events Enterprise but absent in Blackthorn Events and Fonteva Events. This feature is available in AC Events Enterprise but absent in Blackthorn Events and Fonteva Events.

One-click Registration for Logged-in Users. It’s extremely convenient that users whose data is already in the database don’t need to enter their registration data whenever registering for events. With this functionality, you can provide a simple and quick registration for your users and prevent data duplications. This feature is available in AC Events Enterprise and Fonteva Events, but absent in Blackthorn Events.

Flexible Event Page Styling and Layout. For many companies, it’s important to follow the corporate style and design whether in small details or more global things. So the ability to customize event pages with specific colors, designs, and logos could be critical. Experience Builder provides unlimited flexibility in changing layouts, styling, and adding custom components and integrations. It’s even possible to set up and display separate event landing pages with different layouts, components, and designs for different audiences with Page Variations functionality in Experience Builder. This feature is available in AC Events Enterprise, but absent in Fonteva and Blackthorn Events.

Zones. When you run different types of events, when your events are aimed at different groups of people or different regions it can be crucial to have the ability to divide them into sub-groups to better manage them and effectively work with different audiences. You can create several tabs for your event page with different types of events, or you can set up displaying particular events for a specific audience. This feature is available in AC Events Enterprise, but absent in Fonteva and Blackthorn Events.

Salesforce Audiences and Personalization features. Using Audiences and Personalization features provided by Salesforce you can significantly extend your customization possibilities. With Page Variations functionality you can easily create multiple alternative versions of a page and assign each of them to different audiences. You don’t need to create a blank page every time you want to add a new one – you can just duplicate an existing one and change it. These pages can be completely different from layouts to components. It’s also possible to set one of the page variations as the default page so that this page will be displayed to all users who are not a member of any audience. Audiences can be created by the following criteria: location, permissions sets, profiles, users, or records.

For example, if you want to notify users from a specific region about some changes to an event you can just add the Rich Text component specifically for this region and describe all the details. Or if you want to give permission to create events from the Experience Site only for users from a specific audience you can add Create Event button only to the page variation assigned to this category. This functionality is available only in AC Event Enterprise.

Salesforce Sharing and Access Control. Salesforce built a complex and extensive toolset for controlling access such as sharing rules, apex, and manual sharing, sharing sets that provide very powerful tools to control the visibility of events. For instance, it’s even possible to set up different visibility for events that are created in one zone. If a company runs events for different regions and wants users from one of the regions could see only events taking place in their region and don’t see others – it’s possible with sharing and access control functionality. Since AC Events Enterprise and Fonteva Events are fully native to Salesforce, you can have full access control and make any visibility customizations according to your requirements. Blackthorn Events app doesn’t provide such functionality.

Community Driven Events. For many companies and non-profit organizations can be very important to allow Experience Site users to create events by themselves. It could be some student activities, volunteer meetings, or employee events. And this unique feature is available in AC Events Enterprise. With this functionality, users can create events directly on the Experience Site. These events can be published immediately or after moderator approval, depending on the settings.

Chatter Groups Integration. You can provide event attendees with the ability to communicate with each other, discuss events, and share their thoughts, photos and feedback. AC Events Enterprise provides such functionality out-of-the-box, so your users can enjoy all standard Chatter features in this app. Other solutions don’t provide it out-of-the-box so you need to do some customizations in order to use it.

Comparison Table of the Main Event Management Software Features

We have put all key features in one table to show you the benefits of each EMS we mentioned above. With this table, you could search for features important to you and draw conclusions about what application suits you best.

If you are interested in more information about the AC Events Enterprise app feel free to get a demo. Our experts will be happy to answer all your questions. Also, follow us on social media to stay updated: LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.