Today, we are excited to bring you ApnaComplex for Android.

For the first time, Housing Societies and Apartment Complexes in India can take advantage of the Smart Phones to manage their affairs.

In this first version of ApnaComplex for Android, all our customers having a member account in ApnaComplex can login via the native Andriod app on their mobile and access Complaint Box and Financial Statement on the go.

With ApnaComplex for Android, Users can log new complaints on the go – as and when they notice an issue. There is no need to remember the issue, come back to the desk, login and raise. Once logged, the complaint will follow the usual assignment and escalation process – just like when a complaint is logged via web portal. Users can also view open complaints and the updates on the complaint. Users can also add more notes to the complaint.

Users can also check the outstanding balance and detailed financial statement using ApnaComplex for Android.

We have worked hard to frog leap Apartment Management and Society Accounting into the smart phone generation – look forward to see you using ApnaComplex for Android and hearing your feedback. Enjoy and wait for rapid addition of more and more features on the smart phone!

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Want to get smart in your housing society management? – Get on to ApnaComplex – Today!

ApnaComplex is India’s most comprehensive web based housing society accounting, management and communication software. It is designed to make the life of residents and owners way lot better by bringing in more transparency and accountability in managing a housing society. Check out the features of ApnaComplex and sign up your society today to get the benefits! We offer a free 30-day trial as well so that you can try before you buy!

Citilights Rustique, an apartment complex in Whitefield, Bangalore has selected ApnaComplex quite sometime back after thorough evaluation of other portals. Today we received a great testimonial from Mr. Prasad, Treasurer of Citilights Rustique Apartments Owners Welfare Association . Happy to share the same below:

We at Rustique have been using ApnaComplex for a while now. It is definitely the best portal based on our evaluations with other similar portals. It helps in managing various day to day activities of a typical association.

The accounting module is the best and robust one, it is very simple to use, this helped us in not only in managing the accounting but also made things transparent.

The support provided by ApnaComplex team is always lightening fast. We are very happy with our over all experience with ApnaComplex .
Prasad
CRAOWA Treasurer

Thank you Mr. Prasad for your words!! We are so happy to receive these words from you!

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Want to ease your (or your treasurer’s) burden? – Get on to ApnaComplex – Today!

ApnaComplex is India’s most comprehensive web based housing society accounting, management and communication software. It is designed to make the life of residents and owners way lot better by bringing in more transparency and accountability in managing a housing society. Check out the features of ApnaComplex and sign up your society today to get the benefits! We offer a free 30-day trial as well so that you can try before you buy!

We are happy to announce a key new addition to ApnaComplex feature set – ‘Automated Scheduled Reports’ – that is available for every society.

With this feature, any one in your society can now receive various reports by email at a pre-defined and periodic intervals (OneTime, Daily, Weekly, Monthly).
You can schedule reports to be sent to entire community/owners/committee/sub groups or to a selected set of individuals.

Some of the “new” things you can do in your society with this feature:
1. Improve Financial Transparency by auto-publishing Income/Expense statement to all owners every month!
2. Schedule to send List of all expense details for the week to the entire committee!
3. Get End of the day cash/bank balances on a daily basis!
4. Automatically send updated key contact list once a month to entire community!
5. Get Bouncing email ID report once a week!
and much more… All just by configuring for few minutes.

There are around 40+ reports available for scheduling. As always, the list will continue to grow as we move forward.

To start using this feature, go to Reports->Reports List and click the ‘Scheduled Reports’ button.

Please note that the system shall execute and send reports post mid-night every day.

Background: Housing Societies and need for Payment Gateway

Housing societies, welfare associations and folks managing multi-tenancy buildings/ complexes keep collecting recurring dues from the members. Members usually pay their dues through Cheques, and these days transfer money through NEFT to the Society Bank Account. Non-resident owners also use one of these modes to pay their dues. However, keeping of track of payments from several members, validating the bank transfers, accurately issuing receipts is a big issue for the treasurers and accountants and the amount of money that lies in “Suspense” account head keeps increasing as mapping the payment received to the correct flat is quite time consuming. This triggers a chain of issues – complaints from members of not getting receipts, unable to accurately impose late payment charges properly, accurate defaulters reports and so on.

Advantages of an Online payment system where members can pay their maintenance dues and get an instant receipt from the are now obvious – in addition to getting money securely into the bank, treasurers/accountants can heave a sigh of relief due to tremendous savings in the reconciliation efforts and other issues mentioned earlier!

As everyone is aware – ApnaComplex offers a Payment Gateway module using which members of Housing Societies can pay their dues online and avoid all the reconciliation problems mentioned above.

A word of caution: Integrating with Payment Gateways and offering such a solution needs to be thorough, requires lots of due diligence to ensure safety of the money and comply with all relevant regulations. There have been providers in the market offering solutions for Housing Societies that were not fully legally compliant and were forced to change their solution. This has created a dent in the confidence of Housing Societies to go fully online. With the vast industry experience the founding team brings to the table, trust ApnaComplex to not offer services hastily without appropriate due diligence.

The online payment gateway platform offered by ApnaComplex is a reputed Payment Gateway operating in India since past 7 years and is complliant with PCI, ISO 27001 & RBI norms, whereby funds are settled directly to existing bank account of the society, via trusted banks in India for your society’s members to transact online with confidence.

Here is the detailed explanation on the online payment gateway integration in ApnaComplex.com that can clarify various questions we keep receiving from our prospects and customers. ApnaComplex is an alliance partner for one of the leading payment gateways in India who enables the online payment platform for Housing Societies.

Enabling Payment Gateway for a Society

As a first step, like any other business that collects money, the Housing Society or the RWA which is going to collect the funds electronically shall be setup with the Payment Gateway as a “Biller” (also referred as Merchant in Online Payments terminology). For this, the Society / RWA has to submit legal documentation related to AGM resolution authorizing the association to be a biller and other KYC documents. Once verification and scrutiny of the documents is done, the Payment Gateway shall register the Society/RWA as a ‘Biller/Merchant’. This entire process is co-ordinated by ApnaComplex.com with the society. Upon successful verification and merchant registration, merchant details are provided to the society by the Payment Gateway. The same merchant details shall be updated in the ApnaComplex portal, and the online payment facility is turned on for the society’s portal hosted on ApnaComplex.

Making a payment using Payment Gateway

• A members logs into ApnaComplex.com and selects to make a payment using Payment Gateway.
• ApnaComplex redirects the user to Payment Gateway along with the Merchant details of that society.
• Member enters amount to be paid, and other credit card / net-banking details on the Payment Gateways’ pages and completes the transaction
• The funds flow from the members account/credit card to the account of the Payment Gateway. This is an RBI monitored bank account.
• Upon successful payment, the payment gateway redirects the member to ApnaComplex portal’s payment confirmation screen along with the amount paid
• ApnaComplex mails a PDF receipt to the member and also updates the member’s ledgers and other accounts to reflect the payment
• The payment gateway transfers the money to Society’s Bank Account directly.
• It is important to note that the money paid by member NEVER comes to an account which is related to ApnaComplex.com in any way. The funds flow from the Member’s Account to the Society’s Bank Account using RBI approved and monitored channels – thus making this a fully legally compliant mechanism for making online payments.

Other options we had

Another way of offering the payment gateway to housing societies would have been to become payment aggregator ourselves. We have decided against that as that would deviate us from our core business and made us a electronic payments organization. Instead, we chose to partner with a well established and respected payment gateway player as it offers the following advantages:

• Proven Technology Stack – No need to Re-invent the Wheel: The complete technology stack that processes your funds is used by thousands and thousands of merchants daily (including some of the leading e-commerce sites in India) and is owned by an organization which provides payment gateway functionality in around 50 countries around the world.
• Fraud Detection: The complete system of managing the funds and getting them transferred is done by a leader in this area with sophisticated tools for fraud detection and risk management.
• Easy Compliance: As the payment gateway is one of the leaders in the space, they keep their systems updated as per RBI guidelines that can change from time to time.
• No Additional Benefit: There is no additional benefit that we can offer to our customers by we becoming a payment aggregator ourselves. Instead that exposes them to greater risk due of non-complaince and fraud due as mentioned in earlier points.

We have always valued legal compliance over business and are glad that we are providing the users of ApnaComplex.com an effective, compliant and with leading edge technology. If you have more questions, please feel free to Contact Us with your queries.

As the year end comes , we just recieved great testimonial from Mr. Ganesh Raja, treasurer of Ittina Abby, a 200+ unit society in Bangalore who have been using ApnaComplex for past 6 months now. Below is the testimonial:

Gone are the days of Maintaining Excel sheets and reconciling the same for Expenses made … Gone are the Days of having a home grown solution that crashes or have sleepless nights thinking about a Hard Disk crashes… ApnaComplex has really revolutionized facility maintenance all the way from collecting Maintenance to spending it. We at ITTINA ABBY are so happy and yesterday also a resident was saying how easy it is to use it and they never have to come to the Treasurer’s office for anything.

Great Team who is always ready to hear our problems and offer a solution even if it means more work for them. Always there to correct mistakes made by our Facility Manager, Support is so important for a System like this and the Team at Apnacomplex have understood that very well.

Kudos to the team and hope to see them enhance this more as we roll into 2012. — Ganesh, Treasurer ITTINA ABBY LBS Nagar Vimanapura PO”

Thank you Mr. Ganesh for your kind words!! We are so happy to receive these words from you!

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Want to ease your (or your treasurer’s) burden? – Get on to ApnaComplex – Today!

ApnaComplex is India’s most comprehensive web based housing society accounting, management and communication software. It is designed to make the life of residents and owners way lot better by bringing in more transparency and accountability in managing a housing society. Check out the features of ApnaComplex and sign up your society today to get the benefits! We offer a free 30-day trial as well so that you can try before you buy!

Recently Kamal Co-operative Housing Society, Mumbai went live on ApnaComplex. The society has moved all thier accounts into ApnaComplex and for the first time issued digital invoices and receipts to its members. Mr. Hemang Thakker, Hon. Treasurer of the society was very pleased with the many positive comments from their members and has the following to say on ApnaComplex –

“We were on the lookout for an accounting software for our society for quite some time. We zeroed in on Apnacomplex as the site is well designed and featured all the things one looks for in a good software AND offered a no-obligation one month free trial.

The best part is that ApnaComplex delivers what it promises. I am very happy to say that all the doubts, queries and issues raised by us were addressed promptly and in a very positive manner. And as new features are being added the whole experience becomes richer.

We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship and would recommend the program whole heartedly.”

Thank you Mr. Thakker for your kind words!

ApnaComplex now supports the most flexible automation of  recurring invoices. Any invoice that is raised periodically can now be automated.

ApnaComplex, in the recurring invoice module, till now had the ability to automate generation of invoices for a given set of charges for all flats. The charges could be based on a flat rate or per square feet basis. However, Treasurers who use complex formulae for maintenance charges (such as Rs. 1000/- for 2BHKs, Rs. 3000/- for 3 BHK or Rs. 2/- pfst of built up area + Rs. 1/- of terrace) or have additional charges to be posted for few flats (such as parking lot rentals for few members) were not able to benefit from the recurring invoice module.

Bringing a smile on the lips of these treasurers, ApnaComplex now supports raising of invoices periodically based on charges uploaded via spread sheet. Create the charges to be invoiced periodically in a spreadsheet and set up the invoicing schedule! Invoices will automatically get posted based on the schedule. With this treasurers can automate the posting of different amounts against different units and also different charges against different units.

Go to Member Income dashboard and click “Setup Recurring Invoices” to see this in action!

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Get your Society on ApnaComplex – Today!

ApnaComplex is India’s most comprehensive web based housing society accounting, management and communication software. It is designed to make the life of residents and owners a lot better by bringing in more transparency and accountability in managing a housing society. Check out the features of ApnaComplex and sign up your society today to get the benefits! We offer a free 30-day trial as well so that you can try before you buy!

Its been almost one year since we showcased ApnaComplex in the NASSCOM Product Launchpad as one of the top 10 start ups in 2010. How time just flew!

NASSCOM Product Conclave 2011 is a few days away, we thought its a good time to reflect back on our journey since the last Product Conclave. Our biggest achievement since then – we firmly established ourselves in the market as a very comprehensive and value-for-money software for every gated community.

In the past one year, we had many “firsts” to our name and have consistently raised the bar for Apartment Management and Accounting Software with features like:

• Capability to generate fully adjusted Balance Sheets online for Housing Socities,
• Multi-tiered rate structures for Facility Booking,
• Ability to enforce acceptance of bye-laws by members,
• Online Society Registers to meet regulatory needs,
• Highly configurable Penalty Rules Engine,
• Meeting Management – Innovative Meeting Calendar for Society Meetings/Events

For those who are statistically inclined, following are few metrics for us in last 1 year:

• We have made 45 releases – thats almost one release every week – we are always hungry to add new capabilities
• We have done at least 12 major upgrades – all made available at no extra cost to our customers!
• We have doubled our server infrastructure 4 times
• Got covered in YourStory.in, BizExchange, RealEstate Times, Aaj ka Anand, Accommodation Times, Sakal

We also had loads of fun when we distributed Holi Posters, conducted the Drawing Contest for Children of ApnaComplex customers, sponsored and participated in the flagship ApnaComplex – TPL Cricket Tournament along with Treamis World School for gated communities in Bangalore.

All of this ofcourse was not possible with out support from our customers – all of them supported us superbly by constantly giving feedback, shaping up requirements for new features, helping us with beta testing, providing references – what not – they have been with us in every step we took.

Some of them gave us fantastic moments that made us extremely happy and proud like – “Going ‘live’ with their portal with all accounting data in less than a week after they signed up for the 30-day trial”, “Attaching expense voucher generated by the software along with the payment to us!! We take a moment to THANK each one of our customers and users. A few of our customers truly deserve very special mention – for they not only made us sit on the edge and pushed us to deliver, but also backed us to hilt:

• Mr. Ravichandran and Mr. Ram Bhagawat of Citilights Liberty,
• Mr. R V Ashok of Appaswamy Orchards,
• Mr. Balasubramaniam and Mr. Kannan Viswanathan of Sobha Azalea and Althea,
• Mr. P V R Prasad of Aparna Sarovar,
• Mr. Ganesh Raja of Ittina Abby,
• Mr. Amish Shah of SJR Spencer,
• Mr. Praveen of Ferns Habitat,
• Mr. Vivek Baliga of Purva Panorama,
• Mr. Pradeep Parmar of Lotus CHS,
• Mr. Sivaram of Dream Meadows,
• Mr. Hafiz Abraham of Abad Aquarius

We are truly fortunate to have such customers! We also thank various partners – Citizen Matters, Chennai Online and others who were there with us through out.

As we experience the next wave of growth – we make a promise to ourselves that we will continue to build new features and support our customers that will make community living a pleasure!

We have released an enhancement to Accounting in ApnaComplex. Most societies have a need to ensure that accounts are not “modified” unintentionally (or intentionally) once the accounts are audited and approved by the general body.

To meet this need, your favorite software now supports “freezing” (or closing) of accounts for a given accounting period. Go to Accounting->Accounting Periods and click the “Close Accounting Period” which will lock all transactions of that period. No one (even community admins) will be able to make any changes to the transactions once the accounting period is closed. You have to make a special request to Support team to “unfreeze” an accounting period.

This provides an inherent safety net ensuring no changes to the accounts once they are approved in AGM by the general body.

ApnaComplex now provides a view into the audit logs that are maintained in the software automatically. Administrators can now see the list of expenses and non-member income entries that were deleted along with the time stamp of deletion and details of the user who deleted them. Makes it easy to investigate any “missing” transactions. Go to Expense Statements and Non-Member Income Statements to see this in action.

Never face an issue of “I remember entering that expense last time, wonder who deleted it now” – which happens in most desktop based accounting software.