Northspyre, MRI Partner on Software for CRE Projects
Cloud-based construction automation platform will aid accounting and development teams in exchanging data on low-value administrative tasks
By Philip Russo July 11, 2022 12:38 pm
reprints
Northspyre, a leading cloud-based intelligence and project-delivery automation platform, has announced a two-way integration with MRI Software, a global leader in real estate technology, to improve accounting and reporting for complex commercial real estate developments.
Calling the new service a “bi-direction integration,” northspyre claims its partnership with MRI will help accounting and development teams reduce the time spent on low-value administrative tasks and improve collaboration. MRI users will be able to automatically funnel key documentation and data into the Northspyre system, and vice versa, including invoices, contracts, change orders and real-time budget updates.
“Northspyre is a primary decision-making tool for real estate project teams,” said William Sankey, Northspyre’s CEO and co-founder. “Oftentimes they are receiving a lot of the invoices from architects, surveyors, lighting designers, [with] dozens of invoices, or contracts, or proposals. Using contextual information from Northspyre, [they can] flag the impact that approving those things will have on a project. It can also help to automate how you package this type of information for your investors or financial partners.
“When teams get ready to pay those invoices or to formally approve those contracts, they often want to push them into some type of accounting system or job-costing systems such as MRI. So that’s us pushing information to that system,” Sankey said.
Founded in 2017, the fast-growing Brooklyn-based Northspyre, which has facilitated more than $50 billion in client projects, came together with MRI in this partnership because the proptech firm noticed their clients were using MRI anyway. “We always want to make our customers’ lives easier, and we were fortunate to be able to come to an agreement with MRI to be able to have these systems behave seamlessly given that teams are often using both of these technologies,” Sankey said.
On the receiving side, MRI is cutting checks and paying various people on the project, which is often relevant information for the project manager, he said. This can save multiple calls between developers and project managers.
“We can also sync vendors back and forth,” Sankey said. “If we discover new vendors relevant to the project, we can pass those to MRI and vice versa. There’s a two-way reconciling tool which helps us to automatically determine if this is the same information. So now you’ve gotten rid of a lot of duplicative work.”
Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.
