Leveraging Yardi for Real Estate Success: KPIs and Beyond
Originally published on June 8, 2026
“Where I see a lot of mistakes happen actually isn’t always on the KPI side. It’s on the back end. Configuring this, the foundation. This is where a lot of firms accidentally create bad reporting.” — Daniel Roccanti
Most real estate firms have more data in their property management software than they know what to do with. In this Your CPA’s Take on Real Estate episode, Daniel Roccanti and Kyle Paxton break down how firms can move beyond static reporting and use Yardi to surface the metrics that actually drive decisions, from operating performance and fund-level KPIs to debt risk and investor reporting.
The discussion covers not just which KPIs to track, but the configuration mistakes that quietly undermine data quality and what a well-structured reporting environment looks like across your entire portfolio.
Resources
Full Transcript
[00:03] Daniel Roccanti: Welcome to Your CPA’s Take on Real Estate. I’m your host, Daniel Roccanti, here again with Kyle Paxton on another video. Today we’re going to talk about getting more from Yardi or whatever property management software you’re using.
[00:23] Daniel Roccanti: Most real estate firms have an enormous amount of data sitting in Yardi or their property management software. Is it really helping them to its full potential, or is it just helping their accounting team close the books? This data sitting in your property management software should be helping you make better decisions for your business and your firm.
[00:47] Kyle Paxton: Yeah, Daniel. We throw around Yardi a lot. We really like it as a software platform, and just about every video you and I record, I’m talking about getting access to that real-time data. It’s really easy for me to throw in that quick one-liner: “Hey, we’ve got to get real-time data.” But what does that actually mean? In the accounting world, in the AI era, we’re implementing new software constantly to improve our practice and what we offer.
[01:10] Kyle Paxton: But purchasing Yardi isn’t the same as actually implementing what we need to do. It’s being very intentional about how you amass an immense amount of data in real time, how you create the proper processes both within the software and within your team, to actually optimize the software and make it useful so you’re not just bombarded with data. We like Yardi as the flagship property management accounting platform. There are many different shapes and sizes Yardi can fit, and many different businesses that can implement it effectively.
[01:39] Kyle Paxton: Ultimately, in this age, we have to be able to capture the maximum amount of data we can get in real time and distill it down into ways we can actually use it and make real-time business decisions.
[02:08] Daniel Roccanti: Yardi is often underutilized because it’s mainly used as an accounting software. And it’s an amazing accounting software, but it’s so much more than that. You really want to ask: what is the next level that Yardi can bring to my business? And it really starts with real-time dashboards versus static reports. Static reports still matter. Kyle and I are CPAs. We love our financial statements and trial balances, and these are needed. But you need more than that if you really want to run a high-functioning business. Static reports come out and need to be reviewed. Real-time dashboards give you data instantly to help your business make better decisions.
[02:56] Kyle Paxton: I see this come up a lot. When we’re talking about static reporting in the real estate space, a lot of times this surfaces through the lending process. You’re trying to refinance, close on a loan, whatever it is, and the bank is looking for reports and an understanding of your financial situation. A lot of times we are helping our clients pull together reports from two years ago to give an indication of how the business is doing. We can do better than that now. Both in the compliance space and as a business owner making decisions, we can capture that movement in more real time.
[03:46] Kyle Paxton: We’re talking about Yardi a lot because we really see it as one of the platforms that moves the dial in this space. We use QuickBooks with a lot of our clients, but once you get into the real estate space, you have a wide range of properties you’re managing and different types of reporting. You have rentals, flips, wholesale activity, multifamily properties, and several single-family rentals. As all of these inputs get more complex, your accounting records and real-time data get more complicated, and you really need a robust data source and software that can help distill all of this down.
[04:33] Daniel Roccanti: Your business needs static reports and something more timely. Real-time dashboards are usually the answer. Static reports tell us what happened. They give us historical data. They take some time to finalize. Dashboards are much quicker. They’re about what is changing and what we need to do now. Whether you’re management or an investor, you need both. We do a really good job with static reports, not as much when it comes to real-time data.
[05:11] Daniel Roccanti: So let’s get into it. If we’re going to start building dashboards or use Yardi to have dashboards, Yardi has built-in dashboards, which is really nice, and it also has the ability to make custom dashboards. What we’re going to get into is what are some custom KPIs, key performance indicators, that fund managers should really be tracking.
[05:31] Daniel Roccanti: The first category is operating performance. There are tons of KPIs, and you need to identify which ones are best for you and your business. If you’re looking at a million KPIs, you’re really not looking at any of them. It’s data overload. So you need to come in and ask: what are the operating performance KPIs most important to me?
[06:23] Daniel Roccanti: I care a lot about occupancy. Most landlords do. When I’m looking at operating performance, I want to know my occupancy, both physical and economic. Physical occupancy is what units or space is actually being occupied. Economic occupancy is more about potential. What percentage of potential rent is actually being earned? You start factoring in vacancies, concessions, and discounts. We always forget that maybe you had to offer a lot of concessions to get a unit occupied, so you’re potentially missing out on rent because you’re not renting it to its full potential.
[07:11] Daniel Roccanti: Economic occupancy really matters because it’s often more important than physical occupancy. Maybe your physical occupancy is 95%, which is pretty high in real estate. But then you look and realize that over 50% of those units required some kind of discount or concession. So yes, it’s fully occupied, and that’s great, but it doesn’t tell the full story.
[07:38] Kyle Paxton: There’s a huge list of operating performance KPIs, and this can be sliced in a lot of different ways depending on what you need. Thinking through it: delinquency trends, bad debts, leasing velocity, renewal rates, rent trade-outs, concessions. All of those come into operating performance. One thing I want to make sure we emphasize with these dashboards is looking at metrics at both the macro level and the micro level in a way that makes sense.
[08:41] Kyle Paxton: Drawing the connection to what we do internally at James Moore, we swap out real estate for people. In a given few minutes, I can get a good pulse on firm performance in certain areas we track closely, and then distill it down to individuals and how those individuals are performing. That helps me as a coach and furthers the business from the macro level all the way down to those individual people or properties.
[09:12] Kyle Paxton: There are a million KPIs out there, and distilling down to what you actually need is very important.
[09:34] Daniel Roccanti: The whole point of KPIs is getting data instantly, current data. It doesn’t always have to be the most accurate, but it gives me the picture I need. If my occupancy starts dropping and I’m waiting on historical data, I don’t have time to make decisions. So operating KPIs I want to see include occupancy, rent collection, and net operating income versus budget. That last one is really important. What I budgeted versus how it’s actually playing out. You’re never going to be exactly on budget, but what are the big swings? This can show whether your properties are performing under or above expectation.
[10:14] Daniel Roccanti: If you have multiple levels of properties, I really want to look at growth per store, because at the high fund level, an underperforming property can get masked. Those are the main operating KPIs I think about, but there’s so much more: delinquency trends, leasing velocity, renewal rates, and concessions. How many discounts are you having to offer to keep people at your property?
[10:56] Daniel Roccanti: The next category is fund and portfolio performance. This is more high-level, the top-line macro view.
[11:14] Kyle Paxton: Right. That first category is probably the most important because we’re really looking at how your properties operate. Now we’re getting to the fund level. What is my fund-level IRR? I need to know how well my properties are doing at the property level, but also how well my fund is doing overall. You could have one property doing really well and one doing really bad, and at the fund level they might cancel each other out.
[11:53] Daniel Roccanti: It gives you an idea of how you’re doing overall, because this is usually what your investors are looking at. When you own enough real estate, you’re going to have a property that doesn’t perform as well. It happens. But how are you doing as a whole? That shows your investors what kind of operator you really are. Are you getting the rate of return you basically promised them?
[12:15] Kyle Paxton: What I see happen a lot in the fund space is that investors entering a fund are kind of sold on those underlying individual properties. If I’m contributing $100,000, the GP is saying, “Hey, $20,000 of that is going to this property, $30,000 to this one,” and being pretty clear on how it’s divvied up. What I see happen sometimes is investors get stuck on the individual properties, and the operators or general partners really struggle to communicate how individual property performance feeds into the overall fund performance, both from the economic side and the tax reporting side.
[13:29] Daniel Roccanti: Going back to the KPIs we want to cover: equity multiples. Investors really want to know how much they’re getting back. It’s basically a multiple of what they’ve received based on what they’ve actually invested. There are also distributions to date, and net asset value movement. These are all important ones. You just need to make sure you understand which ones matter most to your business.
[13:50] Daniel Roccanti: Moving to debt and liquidity risk, this is always going to be important in real estate. One of the nice things about real estate is leverage. But you have to fully understand what leverage is, because it’s a double-edged sword. It can multiply your rate of return, and it can destroy it at the same time.
[14:33] Daniel Roccanti: Very common KPIs when we’re talking about debt: your debt service coverage ratio is probably one of the most important. We need to make sure we can cover our debt. Are we generating enough income to cover it? If that starts decreasing over time, you want to know as quickly as possible so you can take action. Debt yield is very important to lenders. A higher debt yield usually means a lower credit risk. When we’re talking about these KPIs, you want to know your position before your lender does. Loan to value is the third main one. A higher loan to value means more debt relative to value, which could increase refinancing risk and reduce flexibility.
[15:40] Daniel Roccanti: Those are the main three for debt, but there are other important KPIs: near-term refinancing risk, floating rate exposure, and covenant headroom. If you have loan covenants and you don’t know where you stand at any given time, you could find your covenants getting squeezed, and that’s going to be a huge issue with your loan. They could even call the loan on you.
[16:55] Kyle Paxton: This is all about managing risk. When real estate deals go well, you get all the upside, but not every deal goes that way. This is really about distilling information down in a way that lets you appropriately manage your properties, get out in front of any risk across all of these areas, and make sure we fulfill the goals we’ve set out.
[17:25] Kyle Paxton: I want to jump back to the last category and emphasize something. I see this all the time in business: we budget, and then we don’t stick to the budget. Or we go through the exercise of budgeting but don’t maximize its potential, and that comes down to real-time data. We talk a lot about lending stress and making sure your financial records are sound for that process. It’s all about managing risk and making sure we’re well optimized to fill gaps in our operations and overall performance.
[18:03] Daniel Roccanti: KPIs are the front end. That’s our data. But where I see a lot of mistakes happen actually isn’t always on the KPI side. It’s on the back end. Configuring this, the foundation. This is where a lot of firms accidentally create bad reporting.
[18:23] Daniel Roccanti: Let’s talk about the reporting configuration mistakes we see a lot. One thing we see is people just start building reports. There’s no foundation. No one is defining the metrics. They’re just building. “KPIs are great, let’s build all these KPIs.” And then all of a sudden you have all these KPIs that mean different things to different people. You really need one definition. What is occupancy? When I say occupancy, am I saying physical or economic? What is my net operating income? What’s included or excluded? Management fees, non-recurring items. Even internal rate of return and equity multiples need consistency. So before you configure your reports, define your metrics so they’re consistent across every single report.
[19:12] Kyle Paxton: Another big mistake I see is inconsistency in attributes. Real inconsistency across how we’re naming things, how properties are classified, how investors are classified, what types of entities they are. There are a lot of areas where if you don’t have a robust system, the data just gets out of control. We’re throwing investors in on the fly, adding properties without consistent naming conventions. All of a sudden you’re tracking NOI four different ways across properties you may or may not be able to identify. You’re getting them confused. It creates a system where you’re not helping yourself at all.
[20:37] Kyle Paxton: It’s about intentionality on the front end. Building reports and dashboards is trial and error to some degree. We tweak our dashboards all the time. But before you just get into this, you need a good system to implement. That’s where someone like us or your advisors in this space can really help make sure the implementation goes smoothly.
[21:11] Daniel Roccanti: The reoccurring theme here is consistency across all your properties. What I see a lot of times is every property is a little different, and when you consolidate it, your data just becomes confusing. What we want to see is consistency at the property level, at the entity level, and at the investor level, so that when everything comes together at the fund level, it makes sense.
[21:35] Daniel Roccanti: Where inconsistency often happens is the chart of accounts. If every single entity doesn’t have the same chart of accounts, you end up with one entity recording contract services under repairs and maintenance, another putting it in administrative expenses, and another burying it in payroll. When you consolidate, you have all these variances, and they’re not actual business differences. They’re just inconsistency. Your property-level structure needs to be the same across every entity so that when it rolls up, you’re getting the actual data.
[22:44] Daniel Roccanti: When we’re looking at what a property is doing and comparing it across the portfolio, if the framework isn’t the same, you’re not measuring apples to apples. You’re looking at incomplete data and having a difficult time making decisions. Make sure there’s consistency across every single property so that when it’s consolidated, you have consistent data and reporting.
[23:28] Kyle Paxton: Having that consistency minimizes mistakes both operationally and on the compliance side. A lot of times real estate is held in LLCs with several parcels within a single LLC. For tax return reporting purposes, I have to roll all of those things up into one tax return. My costs as a tax preparer are significantly reduced if everything is clean and consistent. If there are multiple LLCs and everything is clean with the same chart of accounts, they roll together the same way. We make the same three journal entries every year and keep it moving. That saves compliance costs.
[24:15] Kyle Paxton: On the operational side, when you look at something, you don’t have to spend 15 minutes figuring out how the chart of accounts works or how it ties into your KPIs. You know the standard. You see it repeated. You can make decisions quickly. Having that consistency in a controlled software environment, outside of Excel where you can do whatever you want, helps minimize mistakes both operationally and through compliance. There are real dollars attached to that.
[25:04] Daniel Roccanti: A few other mistakes we see: try to limit Excel. Kyle and I love Excel, and it’s great for analysis, but it can be risky when you’re using it for reporting. If you need a number change, maybe it changes in Excel, but it doesn’t actually change in your accounting software. It doesn’t change in your other reports. Limit the use of Excel. It’s better to use something like Power BI or any tool that connects directly to Yardi. It’s a way to connect Yardi to more of a business intelligence environment, where Excel is more stagnant and changes don’t flow through consistently.
[25:59] Daniel Roccanti: Also make sure you’re aware of over-customization without governance. You start creating all these custom reports. Then you’ve created too many, and a lot of them are very similar with small variations nobody owns. Make sure when you’re doing customization, there’s always an owner for every single report, and there’s some consistency throughout. You don’t want 100 different occupancy reports where you’re asking, “Well, which one matters?” Make sure at every level, whether it’s property managers, asset managers, or investor relations, everyone is using the same reports. If they are different, someone understands why they’re different and can control them.
[27:11] Kyle Paxton: Now I want to jump into integrating Yardi and the accounting function and really drive home what it looks like to have a connected system with user roles, security, and who has access to what. Starting at the foundation, if we’re looking at this through the lens of a fund manager, accounting data has to support more than just your regular monthly financial statements. It’s the consolidations of the properties, how things are handled between properties, overhead spending, investor distributions, what distributions mean for capital accounts and future returns, lender reporting, and in audit scenarios, having the support to substantiate what you’re doing.
[28:13] Kyle Paxton: One of the really nice things about a platform like Yardi is that it creates an environment where you can have several different stakeholders within and outside of your business who can get the information they want quickly and in a manner that makes sense to them.
[28:37] Kyle Paxton: Looking at this from a cross-functional storytelling perspective, when you want to tell a story about your business, there’s real-time data for everyone. Asset managers are typically focused on operating trends. Controllers want the reconciled numbers and inputs into the static financial statements. Investors and investor relations teams want clean, investor-facing outputs that support distributions and the tax allocations they’re seeing on their K-1s. And at the high level, the fund manager and executive just want the high-level macro view: the exceptions and risk indicators they need to be paying attention to.
[29:26] Kyle Paxton: In an environment like this, it takes your accounting function to a whole other level because those are four very different things we’re able to achieve in real time within the same platform. Yardi connects with Power BI and other third-party data sources, so there are many different ways to slice this. If you do have other inputs outside of this core software environment, you can combine the data together from different platforms and still get good real-time information. That creates a lot of flexibility, but also a lot of risk in making the system too complicated.
[30:33] Kyle Paxton: The last point I really want to drive home is putting together that data flow road map and understanding what the inputs are to create good accounting records and good operational tracking methods, so we can distill this information into a way that makes sense for the team.
[30:47] Daniel Roccanti: Great point, Kyle. The last thing we want to cover is investor reporting. Investor reporting should always be timely, repeatable, and controlled. Yardi has Yardi Investment Manager, which is basically an investor portal and a CRM all in one. This is a really powerful way to automate your investor reporting. It reduces manual compliance, improves transparency, and improves consistency. Using this portal, investors have access to all the metrics and reports we’ve talked about, with automated quarterly statements and KPIs they can review at any time. It’s an easy way to provide transparency and make your life easier by setting up automation.
[31:44] Kyle Paxton: And Daniel, this investor reporting needs to be clear. I see at times that underperforming funds have lost the trust of their investors, and while part of that is disappointment in fund performance, those conversations normally come back to communication. The communication from this fund is not clear and transparent. The system has to be timely, repeatable, controlled, and crystal clear.
[32:18] Kyle Paxton: What a software package can really help you get your hands around is moving beyond, “Here’s your quarterly investor statement. Have a good day.” It’s, “Here’s how the portfolio is performing now, what it did last quarter, here’s what we’re watching this quarter, and here’s how that impacts the investment thesis we presented to you on day one that got you to sign on the dotted line.” Connecting recent performance, the outlook, and the original investment thesis is really what moves the dial most in retaining and growing the trust of your investors, especially if performance of certain properties is lower than anticipated.
[33:15] Daniel Roccanti: Hope this video helped you understand Yardi and your property management software a little better so you can start getting the most out of it. Stay tuned for next time where we give you more helpful tips in the real estate industry. Thank you.
Watch the Full Episode
For a complete look at how to structure Yardi for real-time decision-making, watch the full episode with Daniel Roccanti and Kyle Paxton. From KPI selection to reporting configuration and investor transparency, the discussion covers everything a real estate firm needs to move beyond closing the books and start using data to run a better business.
All content provided in this article is for informational purposes only. Matters discussed in this article are subject to change. For up-to-date information on this subject please contact a James Moore professional. James Moore will not be held responsible for any claim, loss, damage or inconvenience caused as a result of any information within these pages or any information accessed through this site.
