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RFund Features

Site Map

This section will provide you with lots of information about RFund. It may leave you with some questions you still need answered. But because this page is not intended to be all-inclusive, you'll want to pursue your additional questions by downloading the Trial Copy and accessing the User Guide. Or, if you wish, contact us so that we can handle your specific query.

This page is divided into the following sections.

RFund's Need-to-Know Essentials

RFund's Features — In Detail

How RFund Works

RFund's Need-to-Know Essentials

RFund has been designed to address one important issue. It does not offer endless difficult-to-learn options — it provides, affordably, the menu selections necessary to get its job done, and this makes it a comfortable system to work with.
The main purpose of RFund dmt is to allow current and future fund balances to reflect current experience by being updated regularly as real expenditure data replaces estimated data. It also allows what-if analysis so that unhealthy balances can be fixed, when necessary.
We are describing RFund dmt here. “dmt” means “decision making tool” .
RFund dmt works with total figures — reserve fund balances, funding dollars, and expenditures. And they are all rounded to the “nearest thousand” for less clutter and perfectly adequate accuracy.
RFund's inputs come from two sources, essentially. Its basic building block is the reserve fund plan that most properties demand at periodic intervals. The other source is the on-going expenditure information gleaned from regularly produced accounting summaries. More on How RFund Works later.
RFund uses totals. It works with total expenditures and total contributions and does not work at the “component level”. Does that mean that RFund cannot be used for creating a reserve fund plan from scratch, where expenditures are normally defined component-by-component? Not at all. The component-by-component work can easily be done using an ordinary WORD table, or Excel. Once the anticipated costs are entered in a particular year's column, the column can be automatically added to arrive at the year's total expenditures. Do this for all the years and you have what RFund needs to finish the job. Want more information on this? Please contact us.
Information transfer. Some Boards will want to delegate the on-going use of RFund to their Property Manger or Reserve Planner or Accountant. How, then, are the outputs transferred from the service professional's office to the Board? The answer is … Easily. All computers can “capture” the image on its screen. This image can then be pasted onto a blank WORD document (or into a report), and the document can be e-mailed to a recipient. Want more information on this? Please contact us.
RFund dmt delivers a number of additional, helpful extra-features which will be described below.

RFund's Features — In Detail
The All-in-One Display — The AIO

The AIO display is RFund's centerpiece. It's attractive and easy-to-read. But most of all it's exceptionally informative. Here's a look at part of it. To see this image enlarged, click here.

It's layout and color-choices enable us to say … “No training necessary”. It's hard to imagine what more information a Board of Directors could want, when they're examining the shape their reserve fund is in.

Be sure, also, to see a larger AIO example that includes all the rows of numbers shown on a typical property's AIO. To see it click here .

There's a great deal more to tell you about the AIO and it's all covered in the RFund User Guide, accessible from its Help Menu. But just so you have an idea of the whole range of RFund's elements here's a quick list —

Figures are shown inflated and uninflated.

Various expenditure and funding scenarios can be selected instantly for comparison one-to-the-other.

The Interest rates and Inflation rates for the scenario you're looking at is clearly indicated.

The display scrolls easily from the historical periods to the end of the forecast period. Up to 50 years.

Printing is painless and crisp.

All scenarios you develop can be saved and retrieved for call up when required. Or sent to others, electronically.

Finally, we believe the AIO is so delightfully clear and informational, it makes it possible to use it to show to unit owners, (at the AGM for example), to bankers when discussing the investing of your fund, and to real estate agents who are enquiring about the property's reserve balances.

The Condition and Funding Index Charts

Indexes (indices, if you wish), are handy. They manage to take a whole lot of data and reduce it to one number that “tells you something”.

That's why we've put a couple of index-graphs into RFund. What they do, in a very profound, mathematical … yet easy-to-use way … is ensure that your fund's contributions plans and your expenditure schedule is smooth. A smooth plan is a good plan … free of consecutive years that “clump” contributions, or expenditures. The indexes show at a glance if your reserve fund future plans need tweaking to avoid revealing characteristics of less-than-perfect decision-making.

Here's a screen shot of the Condition Index chart. When you enlarge it you'll be able to read the “legend” that explains what the various ranges indicate.

Property Facts

RFund's primary value is to keep your reserve fund balances at acceptable levels .. not only for today and tomorrow, but way down the line, as well.

But RFund does other helpful things we'd like to tell you about. One of these is its ability to allow you to instantly refer to information about your property that sometimes is buried somewhere and difficult to find. The "Property Facts" section is the answer to this pesky
problem.

The Property Facts section makes it easy to record details about —

The Property itself. Addresses, phone numbers, no. of units, fiscal year, AGM month.
The Board members. Names, position held, term of office, phone, e-mail and unit number.
The Property Management Company. Phones for the company and the specific manager. E-mail, fax numbers, emergency numbers.
Your Reserve Fund Planning contractor. As above. Plus date of most recent study.

Click Here to see a blow-up of the Property Facts Display.

Here's a shot of the input box for the Board members, for example.

Features like this make RFund a truly indispensable package. We focused on convenience and usefulness throughout.

Everyday Notes

In line with our objective of making RFund as handy a tool as possible, we've added an Everyday Notes feature. This allows you to log, in one place, all the day-to-day occurrences that relate to your property's reserve fund.

To operate it you click on “Add New Everyday Note” and out pops a box with today's date already on it. All you have to do it type in the note - "Mr. Jackson came around today and said he thought the air conditioner repairs would run to about $8500" — and close the box to save it. When you want to review all your notes press Everyday Notes from the View menu and there they are … all of them. It's not rocket science, but it works beautifully and will be a singularly useful and regularly-used tool for all RFund users.

The RFund Investment Log

Almost all reserve funds are invested so that interest can be earned on the balances. As experienced condo directors, we've been surprised at the difficulty our property managers have had in coming up with questions such as …

How much do we have in the investment accounts right now?

What kind of returns are we getting?

Are any of our investment coming due soon?

Given our experience, we've built a great little helper into RFund. It's the Investment Log, and it's designed to answer all your questions at a glance. Here's what it looks like. click here to enlarge it.

RFund's Help Resources

Three of them! The best way to appreciate the kind of instant help in RFund is to get a Trial Copy and see them in their entirety. They're all accessible in a flash from RFund's main menu.

Here is a quick run-down of what you get —

The “Quick Tour”
It's an illustrated scroll-through presentation that takes about 10-minutes to enjoy. Just read the script and see how RFund spots balances that get out of line, and how RFund can adjust the funding to fix them.
The “Test Flight”
It's similar to the Quick-Tour but here you take the controls and actually enter data and see the outputs you've created. Takes about 30 minutes.
The “User Guide”
Over 40 pages of nicely indexed material that leads you step-by-step through every conceivable RFund routine. In a few places the User Guide even gets into reserve fund “thinking” and suggests ways to manage your fund that are a level or two deeper than you may have expected.

How RFund Works
You're wondering … how do I run RFund? What's involved. What steps do I have to go through. And more.

This section will attempt to answer those questions. But we add (again!) that you may want to also refer to the Help resources in the program — (if you get a Trial Copy, they are all in there) — or call us and ask us, one-on-one.

The three main steps the RFund user has to think about are …

Three things. That's all? Well, there's one more, but it's done so infrequently that you can't call it a regular task. It's about having “something” to update. That “something” is usually your reserve fund plan as submitted by your Planner/Engineer. It's not the whole thing that's required in RFund, just the totals — primarily the expenditures totals.

Once they're set up in RFund you'll call it the “Benchmark Scenario”, and your tasks will be to …

Update
As often as you can after real expenditure information has arrived. You will replace the plan numbers with the real one.

Scan
Scan the All-in-One display to see the effect of the new numbers on your near-term or longer-term balances.

Fix
Create a new funding plan when the balances are less healthy than you'd like.

How often will you update? Our recommendation is to schedule it as a quarterly job. Most properties average about 10 expenditures from the Reserve Fund per year, so if you updated only once per quarter you'd have only 2, or 3, or 4 updates to make.

How do you work out, exactly, how to handle the updates. We'll supply you with a copy of our Decision Expediter. It's a cleverly designed worksheet that will help you enormously to use current reserve expenditures as a springboard for adjusting your plan's future and planned expenditures. And when you make the change, in RFund, the program will urge you to enter a note that will capture the thinking behind every specific update. That's a real “plus” for using when it's time to prepare a new reserve study.

Don't forget, also, that we'll take all of this off your hands if you subscribe to the Reserve Fund Assurance Program. It's worth exploring. For one thing, you don't even have to acquire RFund or install it. To find out more, click.

So let's say you've done that. You've changed a few of the plan figures to correspond, instead, with the real (new) numbers. What next?

You'll scan your AIO Display. This will let you see, right away, if the balances look worrisome, and if they do you'll consider an improved funding plan.

That's the “fix” we're talking about. If a fix looks worth exploring, you'll put one of RFund's best features to work creating new funding schedules — (doing “what-ifs) — to see if you can arrive at one that looks appropriate. Yes, we know that changing a funding plan can be a challenge — the unit owners need to know why — but RFund will give you … (1) the very best (optimal) plan you could ever hope to arrive at, and … (2) a graphic view of the rationale behind the need to change it.