Chintaro Finance Overview

Chintaro is a Tenancy and Property Management system developed specifically for Social Housing Organisations and offers a comprehensive financial management capability. While there are many financial aspects to Chintaro, it is not intended to replace the Organisations accounting system which will generally manage General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Payroll, etc.

Chintaro and Financial Systems

Accounting package-independent, Chintaro is primarily concerned with managing tenancy and property charges and payments at a detailed level as follows:

• Each charge made to a Tenant (rent or otherwise) and each payment received from a Tenant is recorded in Chintaro.  As a general rule of managing data, it is optimal to only store data in one place.  So rather than duplicate individual transactions in both a financial system and Chintaro, it is usual for Chintaro users to record all of the detailed transactions and then transfer a summarised version of the data to their financial system.
  
• The content and manner in which summarised data is transferred to the financial systems varies between Organisations, depending on an Organisation’s requirements and sometimes the financial system being used.
  
• Data can be summarised at a very high level e.g. Monthly totals of Rent Charged, Rent Collected, Non-Rent Charged and Non-Rent Collected or can be much more detailed.
  
• Rent and other charges for the date period can be reported by accrual method (charges at a daily level) or by Transaction Date.

How is financial data transferred?

There are three ways Chintaro shares data with financial systems:

1.  Manually Entering Data

For Organisations that only want to transfer high level summaries, it can be easier to manually enter the summarised data directly into the financial system. There are a large range of reports and exports available, summarised at different levels, to assist this purpose.

2. Importing data 

Most financial systems in use allow data files to be imported.  The format of the file to be imported will vary from system to system.  Some systems accept a csv file, and others require a specific format.

3. Chintaro/Finance System Interface

Chintaro provides a number of finance-specific formats that have been developed for specific clients, including exports formatted for MYOB, Xero, NAV, NetSuite, Sun Accounts, Tech One, Tencia and Dynamics.  Depending on the capabilities of your finance system, it may be possible to provide a suitable export from Chintaro, effectively automating the process.  Chintaro can create General Journal text files from user selected collections (batches) of tenancy transactions, for importing into multiple accounting software programs. It can do this at both a detail level or a summary level.  General Ledger Account numbers can be allocated to all Housing Program Type /Transaction Type combinations.  Maintenance Work Orders can also be exported from Chintaro in a format suitable for Accounts Receivable

Keeping Chintaro in sync with the Finance System

It is important that the two systems (Chintaro and your finance system) agree with each other in terms of figures. In order to make sure they do not go out of sync, Chintaro provides the ability to lock any financial transactions prior to a specified date.

Generally, this is used as follows:

• Chintaro User ensures all transactions for a specified period until are up to date.  e.g. 30 June 2016.  At that point, the system is locked prior to that date so only transactions dated from 1 July 2016 onwards can be changed.  All other non-financial information can still be changed.
  
• Once the system is locked, Reports or Exports are generated and entered or imported into the financial system.
  

Finance related functions performed in Chintaro

Chintaro functions that can be performed by the Finance department:

• Generating Rents and other regular charges
• Managing Tenants Rent Rates
• Importing and allocating Centrepay Payments
• Importing Bank Statements and processing Payments
• Entering Non Rent charges, e.g. Water, Electricity, Damage etc.
• Managing Payment Splits and arrangements
• Creating Direct Debit income files
• Generating information to transfer to finance system
• Updating Client incomes
• Calculating Rent