Tenant turnover collection is the process of getting every store's sales figures into the landlord system, on time, in one format, so turnover rent, benchmarking and marketing analysis run on complete data. The method matters less than one rule: every tenant gets a method that costs them nothing to keep.
That rule is where most collection projects break. If you manage a centre with 100 or 150 tenants, you already know the pattern, because you have probably lived through at least one attempt to fix it.
Most malls that tried to automate turnover reporting chose one method and asked 150 different retailers to comply with it. The international chain with a central POS team finds a manual portal insulting. The independent cafe with a cash register cannot do an API. The regional chain in between already exports an Excel every night and does not want to type it again. The result is predictable: a third of tenants report on time, a third late, a third only when threatened. Someone in accounts spends the second week of every month chasing and re-keying, and the turnover-rent invoice goes out with gaps.
This is not an isolated observation. Chainels has documented that turnover data is still widely collected by spreadsheets and email, a process that is error prone and time consuming, and that many tenants simply forget to report on time. On the other side of the equation, Gray Matter Software found that automating sales reporting can cut data consolidation and reconciliation time by up to 80 percent and shorten billing cycles from weeks to days. The gap between those two states is where your finance team currently lives.
The fix is not picking a better single method. It is running three methods at once, matched to tenant capability, all landing in the same system. This is how VemTenant, part of the Vemco platform since 2013, is built: three doors in, one dataset out.
The store manager opens the VemTenant app or web portal, picks the store and the period, and types the day's transactions, units, turnover and staff hours. The screen is a calendar with one row per day, and the lease determines whether the rhythm is daily, weekly or monthly. Effort: about two minutes per submission. This fits independents, food court operators and small chains without a POS export. Do not underestimate this tier; a well-designed manual entry with validation beats an emailed spreadsheet every month of the year.
The tenant exports sales from the POS as Excel or CSV and drops it into the portal, or head office pushes the file to an SFTP folder every hour or every night. VemTenant maps the columns once at setup and loads it from then on. The effort is the export they already run plus one drop, or nothing at all once the SFTP job is scheduled. This fits regional chains and any tenant whose POS exports but has no public API, which in practice is the largest segment in most European centres.
VemTenant connects to the POS vendor's API, or the POS vendor pushes sales directly into the Vemco platform through the Vemco REST API. After setup, the data arrives by itself. Effort: roughly one hour of integration work per tenant, done once, by Vemco or by the POS vendor, and nothing for the mall after go-live. This fits national and international chains and any lease with a turnover clause where the numbers must be audit-grade.
The point of the comparison is simple: a mall of 150 tenants is three segments, not one. Running all three methods at the same time is what gets the submission rate to the level where turnover rent can be invoiced without a chase.
Whichever door the data came through, it lands in one place with the same categories, opening hours and deadlines. Missing submissions are flagged on the reporting status screen with one button to remind everyone who is late. The average submission day of the month is tracked, so you can prove the trend to your asset manager. Every submission is timestamped, which is exactly what the auditor asks for at turnover-rent reconciliation.
One thing implementers learn on the ground: the single strongest driver of on-time reporting is not the reminder button, it is what the tenant gets back. In VemTenant the tenant immediately sees their own revenue trend, their ranking in category and their index against branch and mall. Tenants who receive value for their data keep sending it; tenants who send figures into a void stop within a quarter. Build the feedback loop before you build the escalation process.
Can one tenant use two methods? Yes. A chain can run the API for daily sales and use the app to correct a single day.
What if the POS vendor refuses to integrate? Use SFTP. Almost every POS can schedule an export, and the mapping is done once.
Does the mall need footfall sensors for this? No. Turnover collection works on its own. Adding VemCount at store fronts adds capture rate and conversion to the same reports, which is why most of the 800+ shopping malls using Vemco run both footfall counting and tenant reporting on one platform. Vemco Group, a Danish company founded in 2005 in Fredericia, has spent 20+ years on people counting and analytics across 55,000+ installations in 98+ countries, and a recent acquisition added property management to the same platform.
See the three methods on one screen and the reporting status that follows on the VemTenant product page.
If you want to walk through your own tenant list and see which segment goes on which method, contact Vemco Group and bring your rent roll to the call. Mapping 150 tenants to three collection methods takes less time than one month of chasing spreadsheets.