Your ERP Has a Tenant Portal. Your Tenants Still Cannot See Their Store.

Only 42 percent of retailers in shopping centres receive footfall data from their landlord, according to a Retail Week and Yardi survey of 50 retail directors. Read that against the current wave of ERP tenant portals and the gap becomes obvious: the industry has spent the last few years making it easier for tenants to send data up to the landlord, while almost nothing useful flows back down. If your property management system already includes a cloud portal for turnover submission, you have solved your collection problem. Your tenants, meanwhile, still cannot see their own store.

What a tenant portal actually is

A tenant portal is a web interface, usually bundled with an ERP or property management system, where a tenant uploads or types monthly turnover figures so the landlord can calculate turnover rent and report to owners. It is a data-entry channel built around the lease, not around the store.

And to be fair, it does that job well. Turnover arrives in a structured format instead of scattered emails and spreadsheets. Reminders go out automatically. Finance gets figures that reconcile against lease clauses without rekeying. If your reporting compliance was 60 percent before the portal and 90 percent after, that is real value and nobody should dismiss it.

The structural limit: the ERP has no footfall

Here is the constraint no portal vendor can talk their way around: the ERP holds leases, units, floor area and finance. It does not know how many people passed the shop front yesterday, how many stopped at the window, how many entered, or how long they stayed. Without that, the portal cannot show a tenant its capture rate, its window conversion, its sales per visitor or its sales conversion. It cannot benchmark the tenant against its category or the centre. It cannot put footfall and sales side by side on one screen, which is the only view a store manager actually acts on.

So the tenant logs in once a month, types a number, and logs out. The portal is a tax return, not a tool. That is precisely the pattern behind the IBM finding that BI tools reach only 29 percent of staff on average even in organisations reporting rising BI use: tools built for analysts and administrators do not get used by people who need quick answers on a shop floor.

Portal versus VemTenant, line by line

• Turnover collection: Portal — yes, upload or manual entry. VemTenant — yes, at transaction level, with Excel export and daily import.
• Reminders: Portal — standard deadline reminders. VemTenant — missing report alerts plus on-time reporting visibility for the landlord.
• Benchmark against category: Portal — no, the ERP has nothing to benchmark against. VemTenant — performance against branch and mall, with a ranking position showing the tenant's own place only, never other tenants' figures.
• Footfall at the door: Portal — no. VemTenant — sensor-based counting at the door and in the centre, contractual minimum 96 percent accuracy, typically 98 to 99 percent when lighting, layout and visitor behaviour allow.
• Capture rate and window conversion: Portal — no. VemTenant — share of passers-by who enter, and share who stop at the window and then enter.
• Sales per visitor: Portal — no. VemTenant — sales per visitor and sales conversion on the same screen as traffic.
• Layout testing: Portal — no. VemTenant — change a window or layout, read the effect in traffic, dwell and sales the next day.
• ERP integration: Portal — is the ERP. VemTenant — two-way: tenant master data flows in automatically, sales data flows back daily as imported. The ERP remains the system of record.

One window display, one morning

Picture a store manager in your centre who suspects her window is invisible. On Tuesday evening she rebuilds it around a single hero product. Wednesday morning she opens her VemTenant dashboard: window conversion is up, capture rate has moved, and by Thursday she can see whether the extra entries turned into transactions or just browsing, because dwell time and sales conversion sit next to the traffic curve. She did not file a ticket, wait for a monthly report or ask head office. She tested, measured, kept the change. Multiply that behaviour across a centre and the turnover figures your finance team collects start rising for reasons your own data infrastructure caused — which is a very different conversation at lease renewal than arguing over base rent.

Keep the ERP. Add the layer tenants will use.

This is not a replacement decision. Your ERP stays the system of record for leases, units, floor area and finance. VemTenant sits alongside it and integrates in both directions: when leasing signs a new tenant, the master data flows into VemTenant automatically; as turnover is imported, it flows back to the ERP daily. Finance loses nothing. The landlord additionally gets scheduled exports, average vacancy duration, and transaction-level turnover rather than a single monthly figure.

One observation from implementations worth passing on: the projects that stall are almost never technical. They stall when the tenant master data in the ERP is stale — closed units still active, brand names inconsistent, category codes missing. Budget two weeks of data hygiene before go-live and the integration itself is unremarkable. Skip it and every benchmark downstream is quietly wrong.

The scale behind this is not experimental. More than 2,000 retailers and more than 800 shopping centres use the Vemco platform for footfall and sales management, built by a Danish company with over 20 years in counting, 10 offices, and more than 55,000 installations across 98-plus countries.

FAQ

Do we need to replace our tenant portal? No. The ERP portal keeps its role in lease administration and finance; VemTenant adds the analytics layer the ERP cannot provide, with data flowing between the two automatically.

Does the tenant need hardware? A footfall sensor at the store entrance, which the centre usually installs as part of the rollout. Nothing sits on the tenant's till or network beyond the sales data feed.

Can tenants see each other's figures? No. Each tenant sees its own performance, its ranking position within category and centre, and aggregated benchmarks — never another tenant's numbers.

If your portal collects turnover but your tenants still fly blind, see what the added layer looks like at vemcogroup.com/products/vemtenant, or contact us to map VemTenant against your existing ERP portal — bring your tenant list and we will show you what a two-way integration would look like for your centre.