We are happy to announce the launch of a new ApnaComplex Classifieds Section for our members to post their needs and reach out to wider audience. You can access the classifieds section at https://www.apnacomplex.com/classifieds.
ApnaComplex Classifieds will replace the earlier mechanism of posting notices with “Every one on internet” visibility. With this feature, admins need not be spending time approving buy/sell/rent type of notices from members and keep the noticeboard clean. ApnaComplex Classifieds is also tightly integrated with Facebook for members who want to post these classifieds to a wider audience in their respective networks.
We now have a new looking discussion forum available for all our customers. Some of improvements we have included apart from the color schemes and other intagibles:
1. Show last 3 comments by default for every topic. See more with less clicks!
2. Open the entire discussion in a separate window to go through all the comments in details. Very useful for long running threads
3. Improved experience due to pagination of topics. Helpful in case of very large and active communities where there can many discussion threads running in parallel.
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 compliant 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.
Online payment process in ApnaComplex
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.
Bye Laws are the constitution of a Housing Society (Refer: old post on bye laws). Every registered housing soiciety have bye-laws that contain the governing principles of that society. Every society has the right to amend these bye-laws from time-to-time to ensure the governance and administration is more efficient.
However, in almost all societies its a night-mare to find the list of all amendments done to the bye laws at one place. These amendments are typically scattered over in multiple mails, minutes of meetings, some presentations or word documents – making it almost impossible to keep track of how the bye-laws evolved over a period.
Not anymore! In yet another first, with the launch of new Bye Laws module in ApnaComplex, members can read the bye laws and all the amendments at a single place. No more searching for documents in the repository – the content of bye laws and amendments can be accessed right from the menu bar by members.
Administrators can update the bye laws and also add/update/delete amendments and capture details such as date of amendments, date of meeting in which amendment was approved, who proposed it and who seconded it.
ApnaComplex makes information instantly accessible when you actually need it!
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!
In yet another innovation based on customer inputs, ApnaComplex now supports concept of “Business Hours” (or Working Hours or Society Office Hours). Now, administrators can define business hours in a week for a given category of complaints – for example, gardening staff will work from Monday-Friday 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Security staff works 24*7, Accountants work on Saturday and Sunday 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM.
Every Hour Counts!
Now, you can define the escalation paths to use Business Hours than calander days. This means, that a complaint related to gardening will take into account the fact that staff will not be working on Saturday and Sunday and also after 5:00PM before trigerring an escalation to next level. So, a complaint logged on Friday evening, will not get escalated on Sunday morning – and avoids raising a false alarm. Helps you monitor the staff more effectively.
With this enhancement, ApnaComplex now supports defining escalation periods in terms of business hours than days. So, if you want a unattended security complaint to be escalated in 2 business hours – it’s easily possible.
When you redefine the SLAs or re-define the business hours, the complaints that are already raised automatically take into the account of the new hours and get escalated accordingly.
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!
In yet another first, ApnaComplex launches Inventory Tracking Module for Housing societies.
One of the biggest pain points for any society is to track how various consumables (such as Diesel, Electrical Fittings, Plumbing Fittings, Salt/Chemicals for Water Bodies etc.) are being utilized. Things like when was a stock bought and at what price, when and how are they consumed, what is the current balance is very difficult to track all along – but no more.
ApnaComplex has now a new “Inventory” module that would help you track inventory. Asset Administrators will now be able to:
1. Define various stock items such as Diesel, Water, Bulbs, etc.
2. Ability to add purchase and consume transactions of every item – along with date of the transaction, the quantity and the price (for purchase transactions).
3. View Statement of each stock item for a given date range which gives an overview of how an item was purchased and used.
4. Generate month-wise consumption reports for a given date range for all stock items.
We are postive that our customers would find this module very useful. Like with all other features, this feature also will evolve based on the feedback from our customers as days pass by.
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!
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 just released an enhancement to ApnaComplex Groups functionality. The new enhancement shall enable members of a group to interact over email. Till now, group members were able to post new topics and replies only when by logging into the portal and accessing the specific group’s discussion forum.
With the new enhancement released, every group will get a mailing list with an address such as – “my_society+group+my_group at apnacomplex.com”. Group members can post topics and reply to topics using email in addition to posting from portal, very similar to the main discussion forum of the society.
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.”
