Lock-In: Hammock

In a business of fine margins, you can’t afford to be missing your main source of income.

Keeping track of all your properties, incomings and outgoings, has long been a nightmare for us landlords. The stacks upon stacks of paper with incoherent scribbles and not to mention, wrapping your head around all the figures on excel – particularly when tax season rolls around.

But it’s time to take away that burden. On this webinar, we’ve introduced an upcoming partner that does all the legwork for you.

Enter Hammock and their CEO, Manoj Varsani MBE.

Fintech meets Proptech

Not to be confused with what you swing on, Hammock is an online property management platform. At its core, it helps you monitor and forecast income, expenses and tax bills, and supports your bookkeeping in real time. And the best part is, it can be used for all your properties – all in the same place.

But how? The platform may be powerful, but there’s still a few details required from your end to get it moving. Firstly, you need to upload your properties, which can take as little as ten seconds per each one. Another key step is to provide the bank account details that are linked to your portfolio, which enables Hammock to track your income and expenses.

These are the fundamentals to get started, but there are plenty of additional touches to truly get the best experience.

As we said, this Hammock may be a software – but you can still put your feet up!

Dashboard

The dashboard is like a virtual bird’s eye view of your property empire. In this area, you can view:

• Full portfolio profit & loss analysis
• Specific property profit & loss analysis
• Occupancy rates
• Upcoming incomings and outgoings
• Important documents (e.g Tenancy Agreements, Gas Safe Certificates)
• Like with anything on Hammock though, it’s driven by their three core principles of: time, money and value.

Keeping tabs on all this information is very time consuming, but by using Hammock – this time can be much better spent. That extra time could then be used in other areas in property management – or maybe y’know, spent away from all that and just relaxing.

With regards to money, you should never have an unaccounted penny slip the net again, now that Hammock are watching your properties like a hawk. And of course in value, at £1 a property (and that’s without the LNPG benefits), Hammock really does pay for itself.

Rent Tracking

Often, rent is received for a property through a number of tenants – this is where creating an individual profile is very handy. This allows for a specific tenant’s payment activity to be tracked over a defined period of time. In the unfortunate case of missing rent, the individual profiles allow you to chase up any payments and gain some accountability.

You’d think that you’re never going to miss a rent payment and that dent would just be too noticeable. But believe it or not, it happens all the time.

It’s not always missing rent though. Through the labelling system used on the rent transactions section, you can track if there’s been an underpayment, overpayment – or in some cases written off rent.

More often than not, it’s down to a misunderstanding or there could be a specific reason. However, if there’s no specific cause for an incorrect/missing payment, this then creates an arrear for a particular property.

Not Too Taxing

Tax season is a dreaded time for any landlord, even more so when you file them yourself. Through the digitalisation of tax statements within the next 2 years, this load will be quadrupled – that’s right, you’ll now have to file taxes four times a year!

Tax statements are time consuming to prepare and often leave you in panic mode – just ask our Operations Director, Paul Hilliard!

Paul is one of many that has found Hammock to be an absolute lifesaver. By switching to Hammock and its dedicated bookkeeping for landlords, your landlord tax can be prepared within half an hour, rather than spending several hours on end slaving over an excel.

By using Hammock, you can forecast your tax bill and it standardises the whole bookkeeping process. And if you work with a partner/s, you can invite them to contribute to the tax statement too. Whether you file your own taxes, or leave it to your accountant – that existential dread around March/April time has disappeared.

Swinging into the Future

Tech platforms are constantly on the move, and Hammock are no different. Just over a year ago, we were first introduced to them, so you could say that this partnership has been a long time in the making. But the Hammock a year ago is a completely different animal, such as the nature of the industry.

The initial system took about two years to build and cost over a £1 million, but their algorithm is constantly developing to improve your user experience. As always, Hammock are looking to serve all types of landlords, which is why they’re intending to add Serviced Accommodation (SA) as a filter to property type. Whilst the system does pick up SA, it’s not as clear cut as the traditional rental types due to the contrasting payment patterns.

You were already able to invite your partners, but in the near future, you’ll be able to define their specific roles and invite your Accountant too – allowing for live access to anyone involved in your property business. Ultimately, straight away skipping the middleman.

And that’s your lot! You can learn more about Hammock here.