Lock-In: Big Data, Better Results

The world moves quickly in PropTech, so when we realised we’d not had Hammock on our Lock-In series for 31 weeks, we knew we’d missed a lot.

This week we were joined by James Kilpatrick, the business development lead for Hammock with Marco Ferrari, the Co-Founder/COO in the background.

Who? What? Why?

Despite the name, Hammock is as a property finance platform for UK landlords – the titular Hammock is where you’ll be once you’ve used the platform.

That’s because Hammock really does takes care of every aspect of your property finances: expenses, incoming rental payments, and valuations are some examples, but we’ll dig into the specifics of these later.

At its core, Hammock uses technological witchcraft to combine your tenancy, property, and banking data to give you the insights you need at your fingertips. That means endless spreadsheets are thing of the past – good news in the best of times but a lifesaver when it comes to tax season.

And like every revolutionary technology these days, Hammock harness the power of Zeus himself (known as the Cloud these days) to get you the data you need wherever you are, and on whichever device you fancy at the time.

Banking

All your property transactions, in place, in real-time.

Whether you’re big, small, or somewhere in-between, the biggest concern for any property investor is always cashflow.

Knowing this concern, Hammock have made this as easy-as-possible for us – once you’ve linked your bank accounts to Hammock, the platform will begin tracking payments in real time, crawling back through 3 years of previous transactions to begin sensing payment patterns.

This is where Hammock comes into its own – using artificial intelligence to learn what each payment is and assigning them to UK Property Self-Assessment (SA105) categories, ready for your end-of year tax reports.

It’s worth casting your eye over the first few times it does this, as you may want to reassign some payments across your portfolio – but once this is done, Hammock continues to learn and begins to do this for you too!

Bookkeeping

The automation and reconciliation of Hammock is probably the most impressive feature to see.

But this extends to bookkeeping with the ability to manage the balance sheet of tenancies, properties, and even whole portfolios with only a few swipes and taps.

To begin with, you’ll need to let Hammock know what’s going on with your properties. Maybe you own the property outright in your own name, maybe it’s in the name of your property business, or maybe you only own 25% and the rest is owned by a collection of fairytale creatures you met in a forest.

Whatever your situation, you plug it all into Hammock when you enter the property and the system will calculate your tax liability for you. If it’s only a share you’ve got, you’ll also get the total tax liability, but this is only really to satisfy any additional curiosity you might have.

Pretty soon, you’re on your way to self-maintaining records, and when tax season rolls around, all you’ll need to do is report and export – easy!

Property Tax

When we spoke to Hammock about getting them back on a webinar, we were most excited about looking through their new finance reporting tools. Is that a sad thing to say?

Whatever it is, we had reason to be excited. Since we’d spoken to them last, a multitude of reports had been created to make the transition to Making Tax Digital as smooth as possible.

We’re talking General Ledgers, Income Statements, VAT Statements, Tenant Ledgers, Tax Statements, all in one place. It’s enough to make your mouth water.

You can then drill down into the data by filtering any report by property, portfolio, or tax year. Or, even better(!), take a look at the automatically generated tax forecast available to ensure you’re not caught off-guard later in the year.

Property Insights

To end the webinar, we got to peer through Hammock’s periscope to see what’s coming just over the Horizon, and this is where things really got exciting.

As part of your LNPG membership, each and every member of LNPG can access Hammock’s property insights feature – giving you an honest picture of the properties across your portfolio, or even those that you’re still looking to buy.

Several reports are available, pulling data from everything from Ofcom to the Royal Mail, but we took some time to look at the Key Facts for Buyers report in particular.

In this one, Hammock compile a property overview with information on EPC rating, local sale prices since 1995 and some key area maps and facts on the local area (schools, transport links etc.)

It’s a great addition to your deal-sourcing strategy and a nice addition ro have for any home in your portfolio – but the best thing is it’s completely free!

You can expect more from Hammock with their development team pushing out a weekly update brimming with features to make your landlord life easier.

In the meantime, you can relax with Hammock’s fantastic price and offers exclusive to LNPG members.

Find more about them here.