Integrating with Other Applications

This chapter provides an overview of product integration and discusses how to integrate with:

General Ledger.
Asset Repository (Asset Management).
Transaction Billing Processor.
Payables.
Billing.
Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) portal pack.

Understanding Product Integration

To fully take advantage Real Estate Management, it is important to understand the points of integration between Real Estate Management and the other PeopleSoft applications that you have purchased. Because applications share information, you must plan to work closely with the implementation teams that install other PeopleSoft applications to ensure that PeopleSoft provides the full functionality and efficiency that your company requires.

Real Estate Management is designed to fully integrate with Asset Repository (Asset Management), Payables, Billing (through the Transaction Billing Processor), and General Ledger. Real Estate Management does not require the installation of some of these products; however, you cannot take advantage of asset management, real estate management, and financial processing functionality unless you've installed the corresponding PeopleSoft applications.

Real Estate Management also integrates with third-party Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) applications through Asset Management's centralized asset repository and enables you to manage the facilities maintenance and moves using PeopleSoft Enterprise Maintenance Management also through Asset Management's centralized asset repository.

See Understanding How to Integrate With Real Estate Management.

Integrating with General Ledger

As with all Financial applications, General Ledger provides the foundation for how information is processed financially. As a result, the General Ledger ChartFields and other standard General Ledger setup, such as General Ledger business unit, must be defined for reference in Real Estate Management. Additionally, because organizations are required to account for lease obligations based on compliance standards, Real Estate Management provides straightline accounting that integrates directly with General Ledger to facilitate entries for compliance. You can set up straightline accounting defaults when creating your Real Estate business unit or it can be performed manually upon creating a lease. Once the straightline amounts are calculated and staged, the system assigns predefined General Ledger ChartFields, such as account and department, to the accrual, deferral, and adjustment amounts. Once the adjustments are complete, you can apply the accrual or deferral into the General Ledger.

See Understanding Journal Generator.

Integrating with Asset Management's Centralized Asset Repository

The integration between Asset Management and Real Estate Management is through the centralized asset repository. The asset repository enables you to set up properties manually or through the CAFM integration. These properties are generated into the repository in a controlled manner: through the capitalization processes between Project Costing and Asset Management, through the Asset Managers entry as a new acquisition or through the third-party CAFM integration.

The property data in the asset repository enables Real Estate Management to create and manage a lease between a landlord and a tenant simply by pulling the property asset data within Asset Management's centralized asset repository. The property data is stored in this hierarchical order: site, building, floor, area, and space. For example, when a lease is created for a building, the floor, area, and space are unavailable for another lease once that lease is activated. Same is true when a floor of the building is leased, the areas and spaces in that floor are unavailable. The only exception to this is when a sublease to the parent lease is created. Additionally, properties designated as owned in the repository are not able to be selected on payables leases. This minimizes chance of error as well as simplifies lists of properties for selection. However, owned properties and subleases are able to be selected on receivables leases.

Other data stored in the Asset Repository for Real Estate Management includes: location of the property assets, measurement of site, building, floor, area or space, location of assets, and the department or employee assignments as well as property tax information on sites. This data is used for tracking and statistical reporting.

See Understanding General Ledger Standard Budgets, Understanding How Asset Management Integrates with Other Applications.

Integrating with Transaction Billing Processor

Real Estate Management uses PeopleSoft Enterprise Transaction Billing Processor to automatically generate invoices in Billing for rents, operating expenses and specific maintenance fees on a predefined lead-time. The Transaction Billing Processor interface sends invoice requests from Real Estate Management to Billing with the appropriate customer, tax, and accounting information in the right structure to display in the right grouping and format on the invoice.

See Understanding Integration Messages for Transaction Billing.

Integrating with Payables

Recurring rent, security deposits, operating expense reconciliations, percent rent sales reports, and manual fees are sent from Real Estate Management to Payables for payment. Payables then generates vouchers for the payments and sends information regarding the payments back to Real Estate Management. To make this integration seamless, Payables setup information such as Payables business unit, and withholding tax codes as well as vendors in the vendor master must be established for use in Real Estate Management setup and lease creation.

See Configuring the Payables Payment Interface.

Integrating with Billing

In Real Estate Management, a tenant is also known as a customer. Customers must be set up in the Billing Customer Master before they can be attached to a lease and billed for their leases.

Recurring rent, security deposits, operating expense audits, percent rent sales reports, and manual fees are sent from Real Estate Management to Billing through the Transaction Billing Processor. Billing then generates invoices for these payments and provides information regarding the invoices to Real Estate Management. Similar to the Payables integration, Billing setup information such as Billing business unit, bill type, bill by, and tax codes must be established for use in Real Estate Management setup.

See Understanding the Billing Interface Data Structure.

Integrating with Asset Lifecycle Management Portal Pack

The ALM portal pack provides a series of pagelets that reside on the portal and reference summarized data from Real Estate Management, the Asset Repository, and other financial applications for visibility to pertinent property and lease information.

See Using Pagelets Enabled by Real Estate Management.