CRE budgeting software that works alongside Yardi, MRI, and any accounting system
Your accounting system stays the system of record. Kardin does the budget, the reforecast, and the recovery math, then hands the numbers back.
Does Kardin work with Yardi, MRI, or RealPage?
Yes. Kardin works alongside Yardi, MRI, RealPage, and any accounting system that can export property data to a spreadsheet. Kardin supplies pre-written interface reports for Yardi and MRI that your accounting administrator installs once; from then on, the chart of accounts, budgets, actuals, suites, tenants, and rents come out in the exact layout Kardin imports. Every other system, RealPage included, exchanges the same data through spreadsheet import and export against published specs.
Kardin does not replace the accounting system, and does not try to. The ledger, tenant billing, and collections stay where they are. Kardin builds the budget, rolls it into reforecast, calculates recoveries and reconciliations, and exports the figures back: by account for Yardi and MRI, and by tenant for billing. That is what flexible by design means.
What moves, and which way
Every file is a plain spreadsheet. You can open it, check the totals, and see exactly what is about to be uploaded, in either direction.
Into Kardin
- Chart of accounts: account number and name, in your numbering, not ours
- Current-year budget and actuals: by entity and account, month by month, closed months only for actuals
- Historic budgets and actuals for prior-year comparisons and roll-forward
- Suites: property or cost center ID, suite number, measured square feet
- Tenants and leases: lease ID, suite, tenant, commencement, expiration, leased square feet
- Rents: the base rent schedule by lease and start date
- Residential units for multifamily, and payroll by position
Back out
- Output for Yardi and Output for MRI: budget and reforecast figures by account, as an xls ready to upload
- Estimated monthly recoveries, commercial and retail, from a budget or a reforecast file
- Year-end reconciliation totals by tenant, commercial and retail, with charge code, bill date, and lease ID
- Tenant statements and the recovery calculation detail behind them, for the file and the auditor
- Argus (.aif) with the rent roll and first-year assumptions; VTS tenants and recoveries
- Export Wizard for a layout of your own, including alternate charts of accounts and values by cost center
Nothing posts to your ledger on its own. A person opens the file, checks it, and uploads it, which is the control your auditors want and the reason the interface can be trusted.
Three ways in, depending on what you run
The data is the same in every case. The route depends on whether Kardin has a pre-written report for your system.
Yardi and MRI: interface reports
Kardin supplies a pre-written report for Yardi 7 and newer, and an MRI Web Reports package for MRI 4.0 and newer that covers financials and commercial leasing, with a separate report for residential units. Your Yardi or MRI administrator installs it once.
Each season after that: enter the property codes, run the report, upload the file. No reformatting, no column hunting.
RealPage and everything else: spreadsheet import
Any accounting system that exports to a spreadsheet can feed Kardin. The data specs for every import are published, column by column, including what has to match what, and the help center carries download procedures for JDE, Skyline, Timberline, and AppFolio.
Small mercies are built in: JDE’s account numbers of varying length are handled on import, and an existing Kardin chart of accounts can be uploaded as a template.
Actuals: paste, validate, upload
Reforecasting and year-end reconciliation need one thing from accounting: closed months of actuals by entity and account. Copy the range, paste it into Current Year Actuals, and Kardin validates before anything is written. Accounts missing from your Kardin chart of accounts are listed, not silently dropped, and a system that credits income can have its signs adjusted on the way in.
Portal companies can switch on bulk import of actuals across a portfolio.
“We are an accounting-agnostic budgeting tool. Regardless of whether you are using MRI, Yardi, or any other accounting software, as long as the data can be downloaded into a CSV format, we can import it directly into Kardin.”
What an interface report is worth: 135 hours a season
Before interface reports, Vanderbilt Office Properties spent about 30 minutes per building cleaning up a standard accounting export before it could be uploaded. Across roughly 90 Class A office buildings, that is an estimated 135 hours of data manipulation every budget season.
With Kardin’s interface reports installed on their accounting system, the team enters property codes, downloads one consolidated file, and uploads it. Kardin’s implementation team pulled the initial rents, tenants, and suites from the accounting system and set up the first files, so budget season started on clean data. Read the full case study.
Why alongside, not instead
An accounting system records what happened. A budgeting engine models what will, lease by lease. Keeping them separate lets each one be good at its job.
Nothing to rip out
Your accounting system stays the system of record. Kardin does not issue invoices, post to the ledger, or touch collections. It produces the numbers those systems bill and post from.
Nothing to wait for
There is no budgeting module to license from your accounting vendor, no roadmap to wait on, and no IT project between you and budget season. Install the interface report, or export a spreadsheet, and start.
Your chart of accounts, your numbering
Kardin imports your accounts as they are and can carry alternate charts of accounts for reporting to different owners, so the budget speaks the ledger’s language rather than a translation of it.
Built for leases, not just ledgers
Escalations, recovery pools, caps, base years, and occupancy-based gross-ups are first-class parts of the model, not formulas somebody maintains by hand. That is the part an accounting system was never built to do, and the part Kardin has done for 30 years.
Accounting system questions, answered
What controllers, property managers, and accounting administrators ask before connecting Kardin to what they already run.
Does Kardin work with Yardi?
Yes. Kardin supplies a pre-written interface report for Yardi 7 and newer. Your Yardi administrator installs it once; from then on it exports the chart of accounts, budgets, actuals, suites, tenants, and rents in the spreadsheet layout Kardin imports directly. On the way back, the Output for Yardi export writes budget and reforecast figures by account into an xls file ready to upload to Yardi, and the year-end reconciliation export carries each tenant’s recovery true-up for billing.
Does Kardin work with MRI?
Yes. Kardin supplies a pre-written report for MRI 4.0 and newer, delivered through MRI Web Reports, covering financials and commercial leasing, with a separate report for residential units. Once your MRI administrator installs it, exports land in Kardin’s import format. Budget and reforecast figures go back through the Output for MRI export, and reconciliation totals through the year-end reconciliation export.
Does Kardin work with RealPage, JDE, Skyline, Timberline, AppFolio, or another accounting system?
Yes, through spreadsheet import and export. Any accounting system that can export property data to a spreadsheet can feed Kardin. The published data specs list the columns for each import: chart of accounts, suites, tenants, rents, current-year budget and actuals, historic financials, residential units, and payroll. Kardin’s help center carries download procedures for JDE, Skyline, Timberline, and AppFolio, and JDE’s variable-length account numbers are handled on import.
What is a Kardin interface report?
A report added to your accounting system, not to Kardin, that extracts property data in exactly the layout Kardin imports. Kardin supplies it pre-written for Yardi and MRI, and your accounting administrator installs it once. It replaces the manual cleanup of a standard export. At Vanderbilt Office Properties that cleanup ran about 30 minutes per building before interface reports, an estimated 135 hours per budget season across roughly 90 buildings.
Does Kardin replace my accounting system?
No, and it is not meant to. Your accounting system stays the system of record for the ledger, tenant billing, and collections. Kardin is the budgeting, reforecasting, and recovery engine that works alongside it: data comes in from the accounting system, the budget and the recovery math happen in Kardin, and the figures go back out for posting and billing. Kardin does not issue invoices.
How do recovery amounts get back to my accounting system for billing?
As an export you upload, not an automatic push. Estimated monthly recoveries export from a budget or reforecast file for commercial and retail tenants. At year end, the Year End Commercial Reconciliation and Year End Retail Reconciliation exports carry each tenant’s reconciliation total, with charge code, tenant, bill date, and lease ID, as a CSV your accounting team uploads or bills from. Kardin also produces tenant statements if you bill from those.
Does Kardin export to Argus or VTS?
Yes. The Argus export writes an .aif file carrying the rent roll with first-year assumptions and steps, first-year operating expenses, and first-year capital expenditures. Three VTS exports carry tenants, estimated commercial recoveries, and estimated retail recoveries for upload to the VTS leasing and asset management platform.
See it against your own export
Bring a spreadsheet from your accounting system. We will show you the import, the budget, and the file that goes back.