Category: Release Note

AssetCore shock Australia 22-15 in Social housing finance World Cup

AssetCore blew Pool C wide open with a thrilling win over a pedestrian Australia, combining a raft of new features with solid presentational improvements – as well as a willingness to run the ball and good imagination at the breakdown.

Wallabies head coach Jones admitted his side were outthought and outfought – ‘If I’ve told the lads once I’ve told them a thousand times, the essence of a security re-valuation exercise is accuracy, good records and tight cost-control. I might as well have been talking to housing maintenance.’

AssetCore tight-head prop and team captain Chris Sharp remains unavailable for comment following 24 hours of post match celebration, leaving journalists such as myself scrabbling to write their own sporting cliches.

1. New Loan/programme editor
   The Loan editor got a rewrite and is quite a bit smarter.
   
2. Summary grid
   Previously the Summary Grid worked on a portfolio of properties – now you can select a Programme/Loan, Trust, Portfolio or All.
   
3. Summary Grid Decimal Places
   Just a display improvement – decimal places now vary depending upon the analytics chosen in the Summary Grid.
   
4. New transaction types – Charge and Uncharge
   More transaction types, more forms, more automation of the relationship with the trustee or lender.
   
5. The Treasury report has many new fields:
   Annual Interest Due
   Headroom Income
   Headroom Income %
   Coupon
   Facility Income Requirement (which is now calculated)
   Undrawn amount (not the hardest of numbers to calculate…)
6. Cash collateral
   Where loans have cash collateral (perhaps as a result of a sales transaction where insufficient security remains) AssetCore can now include it in calculations.
   
7. API Uploads extended
   Most property and loan data can now be automatically imported from third party systems following a large extension to the range of data supported by this most vital of components…
   

The Way Forward
The next release is scheduled for December, the content for which will be determined Monday October 2nd: if you have an idea for how AssetCore could be even more super-intelligent and helpful please throw an item on the Enhancements section of the product and we will get in touch.

‘Hey you, don’t watch that, watch this’
Come see the madness at Jacinta and Chris’ legendary AssetCore Roadshow on Thursday September 28th at 10am – the rumour that they will be wearing baggy trousers and pork pie hats is completely without basis in fact.

Support
If we can assist with any AssetCore-related aspect of your day please drop us a line on 020 3637 8951 – don’t be shy, we aren’t.

AssetCore Celebrates Results

I write this moments after opening our results envelope and am delighted to announce straight A*s for our new other category, disposal transaction, automated reporting and automated compliance features.  The shine was somewhat taken off by the D- awarded for release time-keeping but as this is obviously the result of government intervention we will continue partying non-stop, sobering up briefly for the start of term at University of Clerkenwell’s shiny new Garrett Street Campus in September.

A photo of the AssetCore team jumping in the air whilst holding our letter has been circulated to the major newspapers for use with this press release but has inexplicably been overlooked.

1. Disposal Transactions
   We have automated the process of transfers, disposals and staircasing! DS1 and DS3 forms are also (optionally) generated. This should save considerable time, reduce error and put another set of spreadsheets into the dustbin of pre-history.
   A side benefit of this is that property reports will now normally exclude sold properties although can also report on them. 
   
2. Other Categories
   Customers can now add their own data fields to properties. Inspired by a customer request to add a RAG status, any collection of string descriptors can be set up and applied to properties.  The data is then visible in all relevant reports.
   
3. Upload mappings
   Uploads of data from other systems (or CSVs, even) can now map values as well as column names so that imports can be done without requiring massaging of data.
   
4. Automated reports
   All reports can now be run on a schedule automatically then delivered by email. You can also email a report directly from the screen. Even your mum isn’t safe from getting an AssetCore report.
   
5. Automated compliance
   Compliance rules can now email you if they fail or pass a warning level. No more lying awake at night worrying that your Loan to Value ratio is close to limit or your income cover isn’t what it needs to be – let AssetCore take the strain and warn you when it gets close…
   
6. Property Valuation Report
   A new tool has been developed – the Property Valuation Report. It does valuations. For properties. Also, it’s a report!
   
7. Fire Safety data
   A slew of new Fire Safety/Grenfell related data items have been added to properties – just select them on the shares you create for Savills, JLL, CBRE or whoever.
   
8. SAP Rating
   The EPC rating is now derived from the (new) SAP rating.
   
9. Valuation Editor
   A new editor for valuations has been provided.
   
10. XLSX Export for Property, Valuation and Enhancement reports
    The Property, Valuation and Enhancement reports all now extract XLSX format,  helping those who want to do the things that AssetCore doesn’t (yet :-)).

But wait, there’s more!
We did a lot this time – here are the titchy things:

Treasury Reports now much faster
Property editor faster and simpler to use
Trusts now group wide
Filters applied at report creation are now visible when you look at the report, helping to make clear what you are looking at
Report lists now give you similar information, helping you pick the right report
New system tab gives access to scheduled jobs, calculated fields and the new import templates.

Looking Forward
The next release is scheduled for November, the content for which will be determined Monday September 12th: if there is anything AssetCore doesn’t do that you wish it did, slide over to the Enhancements section of the product and drop some items on us…

Help
Assuage your FOMO (as the kids say), attend Jacinta and Chris’ usual AssetCore Roadshow at 10am, Thursday September 8th – this one is big so book early. And bring a friend. Or two.

Plea
If we can help with anything, explain anything or you just want to compliment us on how cool we look on the AssetCore website call 020 3637 8951 – please, anything to distract us from our collective failure to get Wordle most days.

AssetCore February ’22 release takes UK by storm
Announcement of support for Numerical Apportionment blows roof off O2 Arena, cancelling Simply Red concert. Mick Hucknall says cancellation ‘totally worthwhile if it means Housing Associations can now correctly model the effect of cross-collateralisation on complex charging structures’.

Apologies, it has taken us forever to do this. AssetCore now supports Programmes of Loans/Notes/Bonds, cross-collateralisation and has 5 smaller improvements.

1. Programmes
   This means Numerical Apportionment finally makes an appearance – requiring significant improvements to most areas of the system and including the new, excitingly named, ‘Programme Report’.
2. Scheduled Compliance
   Enabling it to be run at fixed times of day so you don’t have to remember to do it. Watch this space for more things being offered for scheduling…
3. Property Report now shows Suspect Data
   New data error columns highlight problems with input data. Will help you get your data shiny as a new penny.
4. New Category of Provision – Residential Care
   You asked, we spent hours agonising over it.
5. Reinstatement Value now supported
   A new valuation basis enables you to record reinstatement value and how it changes over time.
6. Cross-collateralisation
   Any situation where multiple HAs charge security for a single loan can now be neatly and safely effected within the product.
7. Improvements to Enhancements
   Many small improvements have been made to the Enhancement section, making it even easier to contribute ideas for improving the product. 

Looking Forward
The next release is scheduled for May, the content for which will be determined this Thursday: if there is anything AssetCore doesn’t do that you wish it did, now is totally the right time to raise an item in the Enhancements section!

Help
The Jacinta and Chris AssetCore Roadshow™ showing off the new features is scheduled for 10am, Thursday March 3rd. All are welcome. And contrary to what I said last time, it makes absolutely no difference if you have no clue what AssetCore is – the jokes don’t get any better.

Plea
As ever, please remember that you are the joy in our sad existence – if you don’t call and ask us how some arcane portion of the system works or to pretend you need help with your Trustee reporting at quarter-end then you condemn us to Mick’s entire back catalogue through tinny office speakers on an endless loop.

AssetCore 2021.4 Release Wins Eurovision

AssetCore’s entry, ‘Boom-bang-a-boom-boom goes the security charging process’ unexpectedly won Eurovision last night, outpointing a very strong British entry. Lead singer Andrew Walsh said ‘this is only the beginning, next year we hope to learn to play our instruments’.

There are two large many-item developments this month:

1.         Compliance
We have developed a rules based compliance system. In essence, it lets you define multiple rules associated with covenant compliance and test them periodically.

Rules supported include net annual income, shared ownership (and other category of provision exposure), contingency limits, golden rule exposure, headroom, value of security against drawn or facility limits, property type/construction type and many, many, more. This is big. Huge.

2.         Data Loader Rewrite
The data upload facility has been rewritten to make it faster and to make it work better with automated uploads from external systems. To put it in context, a complete update of all records from, say, the housing management system of our largest client, should take minutes instead of hours.

And a collection of smaller items:

3.         Rent Upload in Multiple Formats
Rent can now be uploaded as weekly, annual, monthly or quarterly numbers as well as on a 48 or 50 week basis.  If you have another period we can probably also do that – give us a call 🙂 

4.         Curve for EUV calc % reduction by Portfolio size 
You can now apply a portfolio size discount curve to our EUV valuations to account for the discount valuers typically apply to larger portfolios of assets.

5.         Asset Lending Value on Scenario Testing
The effect of stressing and applying inflation to security values on asset lending value can now be seen in the summary grid.

6.         Treasury & Property Report Pie chart Edit tool 
The Treasury and Property reports now let you choose what values go in the pie charts at the top. The Analysis report has always worked that way.

7.         Property release document direct to document area
When producing property release forms for trustees you can now also send them straight to the document management area, categorised appropriately.

8.         EPC rating field
We now record the EPC rating on properties.  Handy, if you want to record EPC ratings.

9.         Summary grid subsidiary Excel export
The grid of properties at the bottom of the summary view which offers the detail on the currently selected cell can now be exported as an Excel spreadsheet.

Looking Forward
The next release is scheduled for the end of July, the content for which will be determined shortly: if there is anything AssetCore doesn’t do that you wish it did, now is the time to raise an item in the Enhancements section!

Help
The Jacinta and Chris AssetCore Roadshow™ showing off the new features is scheduled for 10am, Thursday June 3rd. All are welcome. YOU are welcome. Be there or be a quadrilateral of equal side and angle.

As usual, please, if you have any questions about the product or how we can help you get more out of it please drop us a line. We are hungry to solve your AssetCore-related problems – and can usually help with crosswords, jigsaws and sudoku too.

AssetCore Announce Roadmap out of Lockdown

Following the December decision to follow the science and lock the AssetCore developers in their rooms, the number of bugs in the next release of AssetCore has continued to fall, to the point where we are now happy to announce the end of lockdown – and the release of the 2021.1 version of AssetCore.

There are two large items this month:

1.         Stress Testing and HPI
The EUV valuation tool now includes the ability to separately a) stress each valuation type and thence security value, and b) apply UK House Price inflation (courtesy of HM Government) to historical MV-ST and OMV valuations.

2.         Property Release Workflow
A workflow to support the release of property from acting as security for a loan. The first of the several release forms required for the process has been developed and can now be generated by the system.

And five smaller items:

3.         Enhanced Drilldown on Analysis Report
The summary section of the Analysis report now supports drill down.

4.         Data Shares can now be for a customised set of fields
When creating a share, users can now select a customised set of fields in addition to ‘All’ or ‘Default’.

5.         Additional fields on Facilities View
The created facilities page now shows more detail on each facility, including asset ratios when drilling down.

6.         Loans Expiry Date
Loans now have an expiry date and Loan views now have a checkbox to include/exclude expired loans. This means that older loans can be kept for historical reporting purposes but no longer clutter up reports when they are no longer of any interest to man or beast.

7.         Enhanced Subsidiary Grid on Summary View
The grid of properties at the bottom of the summary view which offers the detail on the currently selected cell now allows the columns to be selected, sorted and saved as part of the view.

Looking Forward
The next release is scheduled for the end of April, the content for which will be determined shortly: if there is anything AssetCore doesn’t do that you wish it did, now is the time to raise an item in the Enhancements section!

Help
The Jacinta and Chris AssetCore Roadshow showing off the new features is scheduled for 10am, Thursday March 4th. All are welcome, YOU are welcome. Be there or be square.

And I finish with my customary plea for someone to talk to – please, if you have any questions about the product or how we can help you get more out of it please drop us a line. You will find us charming, vivacious, excellent conversationalists and a joy to talk to. Probably.

Customers urged to accept result of last night’s AssetCore release

Although bug reports are still being counted, we at AC News are calling this software release for Biden. Allegations of irregularities in the submission of enhancement requests are, in our opinion, baseless or at least wildly overstated.

There are two large items this month:

1.         Summary, including property value estimation tool 
A new slice and dice tool which gives a top down view of numerical data (weekly rent, property value, NAI,  etc.) for your properties. It includes our first cut at an EU-SH Valuation tool which discounts income and costs to arrive at an estimation of security value based on multiple schemes.  Much more work is planned in this (for us) exciting area. Note that we are still validating the numbers so, out of caution, the numbers generated by the tool are marked BETA.

2.         Under the hood
A structural change (which took forever to get right) has speeded up long-running reports – roughly halving the time taken.

And seven smaller items:

3.         Land Registry title reference editable
It is now possible to edit this field within the property editor.

4.         Dashboard report panels description includes report type 
Those dashboard panels which show the summary and charts of the property, treasury, loan and comparative reports now have the type of the report included in their description.

5.         CSV export from drill down 
The CSV exports in the Treasury and Analysis report drill-downs have been improved to match the format of the other property CSV exports in the system.

6.         Created properties page enhanced 
It now uses a grid and offers filters, column selection and other good things.

7.         De-select property picture 
The property edit screen now lets you de-select your uploaded image if you wish.

8.         Property lot reference as category 
The analysis and comparative reports now allow ‘Property Lot Reference’ to be used as a category choice.

9.         View Loan from Created Facilities
Loans shown in the created Facilities screen can now be clicked on to see their details.

Looking Forward
The next release is scheduled for the end of January, the content for which will be determined in our development meeting at the end of this month, so get those enhancement requests in!

Help
Jacinta and Chris’ Webinar to show off the new features is scheduled for 10am, Thursday Nov 26th. All are welcome. Bring a friend.

And as usual, should you have any queries about the product, the new release, this email, our sense of humour or anything else, we would love to hear from you.

There is no truth to the suggestion that foreign powers interfere in the АссетЧоре процесс развития AssetCore development process.

Stripped of the 175 redactions necessary to protect national security, herewith the details of our latest release:

1. Reporting on loan security positions (unsecured/ringfenced security) 
   The treasury report has been substantially enhanced to include a) properties which are not assigned to a loan (unencumbered stock) and b) loans which have no properties assigned them (unsecured loans). The treasury report now gives a complete picture of assets and liabilities. There is more to come in this area, stay tuned.
   
2. Choice of charts on Dashboard  
   Charts on the dashboard versions of the Property and Treasury reports now use data elements selected by the user rather than being hard coded.
   
3. Most Recently Used Reports 
   We have added a new dashboard widget to show the 7 reports you have used most recently in order of use. 
   
4. Right Justification!
   A huge change – numbers are now right-justified in reports. 
   
5. Enhancement Item Type
   Enhancements now include a dropdown to distinguish between Enhancements and Problems.
   
6. Tranche Name in Share area now shows Loan Name as well
   Previously just the tranche name was shown – causing some confusion when making shares.
   
7. Enhancements Title filter now free text
   Title is now a searchable field for Enhancements. Handy if you have added hundreds of enhancement requests and can’t remember what you called them.
   
8. Effective Date on initial loan upload
   The loan upload facility now allows the specification of an effective date on a new loan.  Previously this was not permitted – for no discernible reason.
   
9. Deletion of document assignments
   If a user erroneously associates a document with properties, those associations need to be deleted – the system used to crash if a user attempted to delete more than a few thousand of those at once. This becomes much more of a problem with increasing use of document management so fixing it is timely…

Looking Forward 

• Our next release is shaping up nicely – we are working  on an Existing Use Valuation Tool! Please let us know if that idea floats your boat and add alternative Enhancement ideas to the website if it does not – there are no bad ideas, just ideas that AssetCore haven’t implemented yet…
• Watch out for our new post-release webinar, details of which will be posted shortly.

Help
At the risk of sounding like Norman-No-Mates, during lockdown we have enjoyed the increased communication with our clients – particularly the video calls – and are keen to carry this on with the easing of lockdown. So, please, if we can help with anything vaguely AssetCore-related, like how some new (or old) feature works or if you want to tell us about a fault, note that we are sophisticated users of telephone, email, tin cans and string, the various web VC and screen sharing tools – and keen to talk.

Добрые мысли … 

We’ve fact checked our twitter post.
We’ve driven to Barnard Castle to check our eyesight.
We’ve taken our daily dose of hydroxychloroquine.
We’ve got a new release of AssetCore to tell you about.

As a keen user of the product you will doubtless already know that late last night we unleashed the raging bull that is AssetCore 2020.4 onto an unsuspecting world.

1. Dashboard
   The home page has been made into a collection of moveable (and removable) editable widgets. There is also a new widget which displays the summary data and charts from any existing report.
   
2. Automate Data Uploads
   It is now possible to automate the upload of property data (rents, for example) from external systems using an API we have developed.
   
3. Loan Editor
   The property edit screen developed last time proved so popular that we felt constrained to produce one for loans.
   Users can edit loan names directly from the facilities screen rather than having to upload another csv file.
   
4. Portfolios Tab
   A new tab has been added to the property screen to show and edit portfolios to which a property belongs.
   
5. Reports
   Last time we made it possible to drag and drop column names in the column picker instead of using the old up and down arrows – this time we have enhanced report filters in a similar way.
   
6. Treasury Report Bug Fixed
   A rather irritating bug in the drill down for the Treasury Report which gave blank results when a user drilled down into the underlying data under certain circumstances has been fixed.

Looking Forward 

1. We are beyond excited by the new dashboard and are hoping that you will deluge us with enhancement requests for new widgets to make it even better.
2. We have moved to funky offices (offices, remember those?) near silicon roundabout. We have no intention of actually going there until lockdown is well and truly over but will bask in the warm glow of knowing that when we do we will be rubbing shoulders with other thrusting young technology companies…

Help
Our operating rhythm may have skipped the odd beat as we shifted into lockdown but yours needn’t – if we can help with anything vaguely AssetCore-related, need to be told about a bug or perhaps you want to be shown how some new feature works, please note that we are expert in the use of telephone, email, and the various web VC and screen sharing tools – and keen to talk.    

‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of Covid19 stays these computer programmers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds’ (with apologies to Herodotus and the US Postal service.)

I am pleased to announce the release of AssetCore 2020.2 to its adoring public. This month we are unleashing:

1. Enhancements
   We have added a shared area for enhancement requests and fault reports reached through an ‘Enhancements’ link at the top of the page. Useful for keeping an eye on what those clever people at AssetCore are doing as well as adding to their to-do list.
   
2. Portfolios
   Portfolio renaming and deletion is now possible from the portfolio list screen. One can also add or remove the results of drill-down reports to or from portfolios, simplifying portfolio management somewhat.
   
3. Property Screen
   Users can edit directly from the property screen rather than having to upload another csv file.
   A new edit history is provided showing csv upload dates as well as manual edits.
   Users can select the effective date of the property information being viewed.
   
4. Additional data
   15 fields have been added to the property record mostly in respect of rent, valuations, block safety and lease detail. A list is available…
   
5. Reports
   When choosing columns it is now possible to drag and drop column names in the column picker instead of using the old up and down arrows.

Onwards, Upwards
All items being worked on for the next release are visible in the new Enhancements section of the product. Of particular note is the ability to automate the upload of rent (and other) information from external systems. Stay tuned to this channel for news of this and other vital improvements…

Help
Although we are all perforce, working from home, AssetCore is operating business approximately as usual. If you need help with anything, want to record a fault or just feel like a chat about the loo roll shortage, the usual routes are open by telephone, email, or the various web VC and screen sharing tools.