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Learn more about how municipal housing company makes use of Invest for Excel®

June 25, 2015

About Bostaden

Bostaden is a Swedish company that builds and manages residential areas and commercial properties in Umeå Municipality. Formed in 1953, Bostaden started operating as a foundation. In 1995 the company was reformed to a non-profit housing organization. Since that Bostaden’s main purpose was to facilitate the development and growth of real estate in Umeä municipality. Company offers wide range of flats and residential areas to youth and students, seniors, and families with children. The main Bostaden’s principle is to operate in an economically, environmentally and socially sustainable manner. Thanks to purposeful operations, Bostaden continuously receives high customer rating.

Background

“We started to use Invest for Excel® around 10 years ago. Back then we simply did not have a decent program for calculations and analysis.”admits Carin Andersson, Bostaden CFO. Invest for Excel® brought logic and consistency to our work. One of the biggest advantages of this software
is a solid framework, which provides you a complete overview on investment planning or business valuation. Furthermore, it has a user-friendly interface. The program is based on Excel spreadsheets. That is why new users find the program easy to understand and easy to use.

For the program implementation and training our employees, we attended open seminars organized by DataPartner. All the seminars and training materials were well structured, informative and practical. Moreover, the software manual is educative and easy to use.” says Carin.

Invest for Excel® application areas

There is a number of areas where real estate companies benefit from Invest for Excel® utilization. For instance we use it for assessment of acquisitions, new construction projects, maintenance, extra modifications for a certain objects or a whole building, and for impairment testing as well. The program allows defining up to 30 investment items with a specific depreciation plan.

Further Carin tells how Invest for Excel® contributes to strategic and operational management: “We use program when we plan long-term investments. Hence the Board of Directors can make decisions based on presented reliable calculations.

With help of Invest for Excel® we can easily consolidate several bigger investment projects and analyze overall profitability and liquidity as well as impact of certain constituents. For single investment project we use Invest for Excel® for cost calculation, when we need to know at what rent level the project would be feasible. Because we have a certain rental prices for different areas; and each project bears own costs, the program becomes a useful tool for making decision whether project will be accepted or denied.” continues Carin, ”Also Invest for Excel® provides a great support in business planning process. It is an irreplaceable tool which allows simulating of various scenarios and forecasting future development.”

How it works

”We store all investment calculation in common folder, so each user involved in investment analysis has an accsess to the calculation files. It provides a number of advantages:

Easy access to data for key financial personnel
Effective project discussions
Optimized decision-making process ”

Photo: Bostaden, Umeå

Conclusion

”Invest for Excel® brings consistency into investment analysis and guarantees error-free calculations. Therefore we feel more confident about decisions that we make regarding capital budgeting in our company”, admits Carin.

Photo: Carin Andersson, CFO

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