Good Data in is Good Data Out: Reporting in HomeZada

Hi, thank you for joining us. I'm Beth Dotson with HomeZada. Today we're going to talk about reporting about your house, and specifically we're going to talk about the reporting inside HomeZada. We believe in a philosophy called good data in is good data out, and I'm a big proponent of whatever you enter in should be able to send out reports that help you understand how to manage the details of whatever you're trying to manage. In this case, Managing your home. So let me talk to you a little bit about the type of reporting that you can find in HomeZada and why it's important. First of all, each function or app within HomeZada has reporting capabilities. So whether you're on inventory, maintenance, projects, finances, etc. So let's start off with inventory. The first thing I want to talk about is when you know the quantities of your possessions, you can actually understand where things are in your house. And that's really important. So one of the reports that HomeZada has is knowing the quantity of possessions in your house. The second thing that we look at with inventory is knowing the values of these possessions. If you've taken the time to enter in estimated values or purchase prices, you can understand exactly what you spent your money on. And you can also understand maybe you don't need extra of those same type of items. The third area is knowing the totals for each space and category Of item that you have. So you may have items in a particular— more items in a particular space, and that enables you to take a look at, okay, do I need a special, um, smoke detector? Maybe there's no one— no, not one very close by, so maybe I need that. It also helps you understand, um, do I need to have, uh, safety measures on something, or do I need to move some things from one space to another? It just helps you understand where the items are. The second thing happens is when it comes to categories. Some people are collectors of items. Mm-hmm. And various different things, whether they're meaningful to them or whether they are actually extremely valuable. Knowing where those items are in a quick second is also something that could help you be better prepared. Let's say you live in hurricane or tornado country and you need to move those items as quickly as possible, or you need to store them in a place that is tornado or hurricane safe. So that's really important. You can take the necessary precautions to understand what all of that is. The other thing that you want to take a look at is maintenance. So in maintenance, there's several reports, and these are some of my favorites. I just got to tell you, it's one of the reasons why HomeZada is here. Have you ever been frustrated because you don't know where the money that you're spending on your house is going? Like, why do I need to do this maintenance? Why do I need this? Why is that? Well, HomeZada helps you understand all of that. So first, you understand knowing what you spend monthly and annually on your maintenance costs Helps you better budget for the future. So homes, if you are tracking your maintenance and you are hiring out or you are spending money on items, then you will need to track those costs. And I highly recommend it because it's amazing and you can quickly do it on your phone after you've had this, the service performed, or you've performed it yourself. Very easy. And then you have a record of when you last did the task, but more importantly, how much that task cost. And those add up. And then you can also track your cost— excuse me, your cash flow. month over month, season over season. And I gotta tell you, I now know where my money is going, and I now know how to budget better for my projects and my maintenance tasks. So super, super helpful and one of my favorite reports. The third area is projects. So project planning is central to successful project budgeting. Okay, so when you begin a project and you plan from the get-go, you have great budgets and you understand what you can afford, and it allows you to back out of those projects. Now you can see some other videos at our YouTube channel that actually touch base on this specifically, but for this purpose, one of the reasons why I'm a big proponent of planning is not only because you can learn how to stay in budget, but also you can also learn that if you want all these projects done in your house and you've done some estimating Before you even start any of them, you may find out that oh, these projects are a lot more expensive than I anticipated. I may have to prioritize or pick and choose which project I'm going to do this year, and then do some next year, and then some next year. I will tell you, it's really fun to do that. I did that with my house. I did a project a year, and I still do a project a year, whether it's a cleanup or a fix-up project, and it gets me excited about my house as well. It doesn't sound like a chore. It Literally gets me excited. So just a helpful tip there. The fourth area is finances. So a couple different things in finances. When you're in finances, you can manage your mortgage payoff, which is always cool to see because we always want to kind of get excited about that. We can track our forecasted values of our house, which is also extremely valuable if we're considering selling house or doing something else. The other thing that we can do is we can make sure that we're insured properly. If we've got our insurance data, we can track all that. And if we've entered the information about our possessions in our inventory, along with the estimated values, then you can actually understand whether you're properly insured or not. The other thing that you want to understand in finances, which I think is hugely important, is we believe that HomeZada can help you track the total cost of homeownership. And if you know how much you're spending on your items in your house, your possessions, and it's furnishings, it's dishes, it's anything that you are buying, 2, if you understand how much you're spending on maintenance and you understand how much you're spending on projects per year, you start estimating some of those expenses. Now possessions, even though they're expenses, they also become assets. And so when you talk about assets, you also learn about the equity in your home minus the mortgage that you own or any other seconds or home equities that you may have on your house. And then you come up with what your total assets are. So basically HomeZada is giving you a mini balance sheet For your home, and it helps you understand exactly where the money is going. Now, this is really important because what most people don't know is that there was a study done in 2018 on consumer expenditures, and homeowners spend 30% of their annual budget on their homes. That's a huge number. So with Homesave and its reporting, we're here to try to help you manage that budget more effectively and. Not get to 40% of your annual income. It's easy to not do preventative maintenance, and then all of a sudden you have this expense that you didn't anticipate, and there goes that vacation. So it's really important to understand exactly what's going on with your house. So these reports are the reason why we built them, because we want you to understand exactly what's going on so you can make the best decisions for your specific property or properties. Everyone is individual and everyone has a different view of their properties and they have different expenses. So we wanted to make sure that we had this capability inside Homesata so that you can make the best decisions. So if you have any questions about reports or anything else in Homesata, please let us know in the comments. I look forward to hearing from you. You can also reach us at info@homesata.com. We welcome any questions. And then at the same time, please check us out at homesata.com. Have a wonderful day and enjoy Hamsa.