International Commercial Real Estate Leader Increases Efficiency with Perfecter NOW™

Key Challenges

This Forbes Global 500 commercial real estate company relied on manual document processing and increasingly expensive outsourcing for daily workflows, but encountered roadblocks to improving workflows, accelerating growth, and reducing operational costs.

For this firm, processing financial documents is fundamental to daily operations.

Every department relies on a continuous stream of complex financial statements to make critical business decisions. However, the resources required to properly read, extract, standardize, and analyze data from these documents became unsustainable. Skilled underwriters and analysts spent valuable time on manual data entry and standardization over high-value analysis and strategic decision-making.

As the company accelerated its growth trajectory, it continually sought ways to enhance efficiency and streamline operations. However, it encountered a significant barrier: no solution in the marketplace could reliably automate the extraction of financial data from documents and map that data to a standardized chart of accounts. While generic document processing tools could extract numbers from pages, they couldn’t determine where those figures belonged in financial models—a task that requires deep CRE domain knowledge.

By shifting to Perfecter NOW™, this team can juggle different workloads simultaneously across the entire business. Information is now processed in a way that supports and adapts to workflows, allowing team members to make critical investment decisions faster and scale operations without compromising accuracy or quality control.

Outcome

30%

Savings in document processing costs

70%

Gain in efficiency

Significant acceleration in underwriting and analysis workflows

The Challenge: Financial Document Processing in Commercial Real Estate

This organization has always dealt with a substantial volume of complex financial documents, since commercial real estate operations require detailed analysis of financial statements and other accounting documents for every transaction.

The company relied on manual processing supplemented by temporary resources and basic extraction tools to manage this workload. However, its existing technology solutions presented significant limitations. While some tools could extract raw data from documents, none could reliably map that data to its standardized chart of accounts—a critical requirement for meaningful financial analysis.

Thus, they relied on manual labor. Scaling those manual operations came with extreme costs, whether they were contractors or temporary workers, not to mention the difficulties with time zones and communication barriers.

Unfortunately, as they continued to grow, these approaches became incredibly expensive and significantly hampered their ability to scale operations efficiently. This company needed a solution that could adapt to its needs without constant restructuring.

“Their technical knowledge and understanding of our domain are second to none. They leveraged their understanding of our challenges to create a solution for us that is far superior to any other company we engaged with, and they’ve shown they’re committed to working with us and continuing to meet our needs in every way. My experience with this company is superior to any other I’ve encountered in a long time.”

- CIO, Forbes 500 International Commercial Real Estate Company

The Solution: Leveraging AI with Domain Expertise

Rather than continuing to invest in limited automation tools, the company explored how recent advances in artificial intelligence could address its specific challenges in commercial real estate document processing. However, given its previous experience with technology solutions, it was cautious about committing to a service that couldn’t demonstrate both technical excellence and a deep understanding of its industry.

To address their needs, the company sought a partner who understood general document processing and the structure of financial statements in commercial real estate. This search led them to Perfecter NOW™.

After connecting with Perfecter.ai, the team committed to a Proof of Concept focused on processing financial statements. During this phase, they rigorously tested the system’s ability to extract data and properly map extracted values to their standardized chart of accounts.

Once they were satisfied with those results, they began discussing expanding into the entire company. According to this company, the Perfecter.ai team’s knowledge made the decision easy. “Their knowledge and commitment to finding an answer to our problems made the choice obvious. We want to use this technology to improve workflows across our entire business.”

With its document processing challenges solved, this company is experiencing unmatched efficiency. It can now share vital information with global teams and scale real estate operations, making it far easier for teams to devote efforts towards keeping customers satisfied and growing the business.