Client Success Story
CASE STUDY – REAL ESTATE / HOSPITALITY / STUDENT HOUSING
Yugo Taps ProLytics to Unify Student Housing Financial Planning Across 50+ Locations
TL;DR: ProLytics helped Yugo unify financial planning across 50+ locations by consolidating Vena environments, replacing spreadsheet-based budgeting, and connecting financial data. Reforecasting fell from hours to minutes, while close-related work saves approximately five hours monthly.
Snapshot: Yugo
Unified planning environments by consolidating two Vena tenants into Yugo’s primary environment, merging the Campus Advantage (Yugo Austin) instance and retiring the legacy tenant.
Modernized property budgeting by replacing multi-tab Excel workbooks with a governed, live planning foundation in Vena, providing greater control, consistency, and version visibility.
Accelerated reforecasting by reducing updates from several hours to just a few minutes, allowing a single assumption change to flow across property-level forecasts and rollups.
Streamlined monthly close by saving 5 hours each month through more efficient, connected planning and reporting processes.
“The best part is the ability to consolidate systematically and with ease, and when template edits need to occur, you only have to make the edit once — not in every single iteration of an Excel template. It feels great being able to quickly give the business the data they’re looking for.”
– Blake Lewandowski, Financial Planning and Analysis Manager
Yugo
About Yugo
Yugo is the first global student housing operator built around the student experience. It was created by merging three international operators, The Student Housing Company, Nexo Residencias, and Uninest Student Residents (with UComm), and has grown primarily through acquisition.
Today Yugo operates 280+ locations worldwide with around 450 employees and a strong presence in the US and UK. Its student housing financial planning spans property-level budgeting, revenue and leasing forecasts, operating expenses, and multi-currency consolidation.
The Challenge
Yugo’s planning ran on large, multi-tab Excel workbooks — effectively a “mini workbook” per property for each budget subsection (travel, G&A, repairs and maintenance), with regional managers keying in property assumptions such as renewal rate, cost to repaint a unit, and occupied beds. As the portfolio grew through acquisition, that model became slow, hard to control, and disconnected from the systems finance relied on. A separate Vena environment inherited from the Campus Advantage acquisition left the combined organization running two platforms at once.
- Version control: across both regional-manager and central workbooks, teams could see who changed something and when, but not what actually changed.
- Slow assumption updates: a single change across all properties meant editing each property’s forecast individually and re-rolling the consolidation by hand.
- Disconnected source systems: budgets and reforecasts had to be pushed back to Entrata manually, with no live link between the ERP and the planning model.
- Fragmented platforms: two separate Vena tenants following the Campus Advantage acquisition, with no single chart of accounts or data model.
- International complexity: EU (NetSuite) and AU (Xero) operations were consolidated manually out of the US, compounded by time zone gaps in collecting data from international teams.
Client Objectives
Yugo was at an inflection point — needing its tools and processes ready to support aggressive growth targets — and wanted property and regional managers owning their own budgets and forecasts.
- Automate and streamline property budgeting for 50+ properties, with a path to global scale.
- Preserve the Excel-native interface property and regional managers already knew, while adding real governance and user permissions.
- Enable rolling forecasts and quarterly reforecasts with assumptions that update once and flow everywhere.
- Integrate directly with source systems so budgets and actuals move without manual exports.
- Deliver timely budget-vs-actuals and financial-statement reporting.
The ProLytics Solution
ProLytics partnered with Yugo to modernize its FP&A function in Vena through a series of connected engagements spanning core planning, revenue modeling, system integrations, global pricing, and platform consolidation. Scope included:
- Foundation: Recreated Yugo’s COGS and OpEx planning templates in Vena, preserving established logic, including price-tier changes. Introduced standardized monthly income statements and variance reporting.
- Revenue modeling: Built a dedicated Revenue Cube for Rent Roll, Pre-Lease, and Market Data, automated data feeds from College House and Entrata, and integrated revenue into the financial model. Delivered four tools for leasing plans, space profiles, pricing surveys, and pricing and inventory management.
- Systems integration and multi-currency: Integrated NetSuite GL data into Vena, added currency rate inputs and P&L and Balance Sheet conversion, and later incorporated Entrata Balance Sheet data, opening balances, and a new Balance Sheet report.
- Global Sales Proposition: Developed a pricing module for modeling and approving property-level proposals, supporting weekly and monthly pricing across different operating calendars, with configurable approval workflows for property and area managers.
- Platform consolidation: Merged the Campus Advantage Vena tenant into Yugo’s primary environment, migrating and validating objects, data pipelines, and historical and current data. A parallel run maintained continuity until sign-off, after which users migrated and the legacy tenant was retired.
- Enablement: Delivered standardized outputs and structured documentation with each engagement, equipping Yugo’s team to maintain and manage the environment independently.
“ProLytics has been a genuine partner throughout [the process] — they took the time to understand how we already worked, then built on it instead of making us start over.”
– Blake Lewandowski, Financial Planning and Analysis Manager
Yugo
Why Yugo Chose ProLytics for Its Student Housing Financial Planning
Yugo needed a partner who could enhance its existing model, not replace it. ProLytics recreated Yugo’s COGS and OpEx logic in Vena, preserving the familiar interface and price-tier rules. The foundation was live and adopted before new complexity was added.
That approach allowed the relationship to expand naturally. Each engagement was scoped and delivered independently, with Yugo owning workstreams internally while ProLytics built toward one connected planning ecosystem—not a collection of disconnected projects.
Key Outcomes
- Single Vena environment: two tenants merged into one following the Campus Advantage acquisition, with the legacy instance retired after a validated parallel run.
- Live source-system integration: GL, rent roll, and pre-lease data flow automatically from Entrata, College House, and NetSuite into Vena, replacing manual exports.
- Governed, version-controlled planning: multi-tab Excel workbooks replaced with a live foundation, monthly income statement, and variance reporting.
- Faster reforecasting: a single assumption change now updates every property in minutes rather than hours, with no manual re-rolling of the consolidation.
- Faster monthly close: automated data flows save approximately 5 hours a month — before the close process has even been fully moved into Vena.
Business Impacts
- Leadership acts on one set of numbers. Expense, revenue, and balance-sheet planning reconcile to the same model, so decisions no longer wait on someone to align competing versions first.
- Property and regional managers now own their own budgets and forecasts. They plan in the Excel interface they already knew, which supported adoption — and finance reviews rather than rekeys.
- The finance team spends its time on analysis instead of moving data — roughly 15 hours a month redirected.
- Acquisitions no longer mean another planning platform. The Campus Advantage tenant folded into Yugo’s primary environment rather than running alongside it, giving future acquisitions a single place to land.
Looking Ahead
The foundation is in place. Now, Yugo and ProLytics are taking the next step: connecting more of the business, eliminating manual work, and turning more data into actionable insight:
- Bring global operations into the fold -- Extend automated consolidation to EU (NetSuite) and AU (Xero) operations, replacing processes still managed manually from the US.
- Complete the platform unification -- Move to a single chart of accounts and data model, with standardized templates and workflows, consolidated pipelines, and aligned security.
- Expand performance visibility -- Deepen reporting across the KPIs that matter most, including sales, delinquency, and multi-period trends.
About ProLytics
ProLytics helps finance teams modernize planning, reporting, and decision-making through practical, scalable FP&A solutions. We partner closely with our clients to deliver faster time-to-value, better insights, and processes that grow with the business.
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