Yes! Communities

YES Communities was growing rapidly through portfolio acquisitions, bringing in more properties, employees, and data with each deal. Their FP&A team managed individual budgets for each of their 300 properties while trying to deliver reporting and analytics to field operators, home office staff, and executive leadership.

The company relied on an Excel plug-in for planning and analytics - a system that had worked initially, but couldn't keep pace with their expansion.

‍

The legacy system created friction at every level of the organization:

Speed and Performance Issues

• Reports took 2-3 minutes to load
• Daily data refreshes ran for 8 hours each morning
• The system would freeze users' computers during loads
• Field teams on Eastern time couldn't access overnight data until mid-afternoon

No Single Source of Truth

• Offline reports proliferated across departments
• Excel plug-in errors created inconsistent data
• Different teams got different answers to the same questions

Limited Visibility

• No access to transaction-level details
• Data was aggregated without the ability to drill down
• Field operators couldn't access reports from mobile devices while walking properties

Scalability Constraints

• System couldn't handle the growing volume of data (millions of rows daily)
• Adding users and properties compounded performance problems
• Building new reports took days, not hours

"Before, they'd have to go load the report, print it off, and then start calls... It just caused a lot of frustration and efficiency, especially for our field users."

— Troy Murphy, Director of FP&A, YES Communities

‍

YES Communities evaluated 15 different software solutions before arriving at a key insight: planning and analytics serve different purposes and require different tools.

"Planning and analytics have different jobs. If you have different analysts, you might have a financial analyst and data analyst. They do have different job functions that they're very good at."

— Troy Murphy

The company implemented a dual-pronged approach:

• Workday Adaptive Planning for budgeting, forecasting, and version control
• Incorta for operational analytics, real-time reporting, and mobile access

Incorta became the data foundation that unified information from financials, operations, payroll, and CRM systems. The platform's Direct Data Mapping technology eliminated the need for complex data pipelines, while its mobile app gave field operators instant access to the same KPIs and metrics available at corporate headquarters.

Implementation Highlights:

• Full deployment completed in under 9 months—including during an active budget cycle
• 90% of the build-out was completed by YES Communities' internal team (2-3 people)
• Soft launch followed by company-wide rollout to all 300 communities

‍

Immediate Performance Gains

• Report load times dropped from 2-3 minutes to seconds
• Eliminated 8-hour morning data refresh wait times
• No more frozen computers or system crashes

Operational Transformation

• Community managers now access live data from mobile devices while walking properties
• Delinquency lists, occupancy metrics, and financial KPIs available on-demand
• Field teams can take action immediately instead of waiting for reports to load

Time and Cost Savings

• $100,000+ annual savings from efficiency gains
• 10+ hours saved per community manager per month
• New dashboard builds now take hours instead of days

Strategic Capabilities

• Single source of truth across all 300 properties
• Transaction-level drill-down from any metric
• Dynamic forecasting and version control
• Scalable foundation for continued growth

"Even yesterday, I built two dashboards. Throughout the day, I was doing other things as well. We can vet those and validate basically in hours and not days while not losing any of the details that are important for running the business."

— Troy Murphy

YES Communities continues to evolve their analytics capabilities with plans for:

• Consolidated dashboards that tell a complete operational story
• AI and machine learning integrations
• Chat-based analytics so community managers can simply ask questions to get answers