North Star is close to completing its full migration from Capita OpenHousing to Microsoft Dynamics with support from Infinity Group. The housing provider was previously using Capita OpenHousing for rent accounting and tenancy management but wanted a more integrated, available and streamlined process.
Sean Lawless, director of insight and transformation, North Star Housing, said, “Our roadmap has been to replace our current housing management system with Microsoft Dynamics, one module at a time. We’ve already deployed the CRM platform and a compliance module with Infinity Group, and in April we launched our tenancy and rent management module.
“Our previous solution didn’t provide access for users to see balances and was rather siloed, with limited options for integration with our accounting systems, so we decided that rent accounting should be next. Infinity Group’s rent accounting module has now replaced all of the tenancy and rental management that were previously done in OpenHousing.
“Our biggest challenge was data. We were moving all tenancy transactions and diary notes from thousands of tenancies, and there were millions of pieces of transactional data that needed to be migrated. By doing this in a well-managed and structured way with Infinity Group’s housing team meant that from our go-live date, all balances matched our previous system as well as our accounting system.”
Infinity Group’s arrears management module, which uses algorithms to identify residents in arrears or about to go into arrears, was implemented at the same time.
Lawless said, “We’re now much more efficient. With our old system, housing officers were individually checking each rent account for arrears, which could be as many as 300 per month. With the new module, housing officers are only presented with rent accounts that are off plan or about to go off plan.”
North Star is aiming to switch off OpenHousing completely in October after the final phase covering the deployment of modules of repairs and voids.
Lawless said, “We’ve seen others ‘overlay’ Dynamics and Salesforce on top of their existing housing management systems but our goal was to have a single modern system that managed all our processes.”
