PHAEMA user manual

PHAEMA (Property Holding and Estate Management Application) is an open-source system for managing a council's commercial and operational property: the property register, leases and licences, key dates and casework, rents and service charges, maintenance and compliance, and asset valuations.

New to PHAEMA? Start with Getting started. Every page in PHAEMA also has a Help with this page link near the top that opens the right part of this manual.

Words you may not know, such as WAULT, UPRN or "contracted out", are explained in the glossary.

Training

Interactive courses for each type of user (estates surveyor, finance officer, maintenance and compliance, system administrator, and viewer or contributor) walk you through the real screens, give you exercises on the demonstration data and end with a short quiz. See training courses.

Start here

• Getting started: Signing in, the menu, finding records and changing how PHAEMA looks.
• The dashboard: What the dashboard figures mean and where they come from.
• Training courses: Interactive courses for each type of user, and a checklist for each role.

Records

• Properties: The property register, the property hierarchy, floor areas, photos and titles.
• Maps: The property map, base maps, Land Registry INSPIRE boundaries and setting a property's boundary.
• Leases and licences: Recording agreements, their terms, breaks and documents.
• Parties: Tenants, landlords, licensees and guarantors, and everything linked to them.

Key dates

• Lease events: Rent reviews, break notices, breaks and expiries, and how to record outcomes.
• Rent schedule: How rent changes over the life of an agreement.
• Cases: Consents, lease events, enquiries and other estate work, tracked from start to outcome.
• Reminders and calendar: Email reminders about events, and seeing events in Outlook or another calendar.
• Projects: Developments, acquisitions, disposals, programmes and reviews, taken through four gateways.
• Rent ledger: Raising rent, credit notes, receipts, arrears, statements and the finance export.
• Service charges: Schedules, shares, budgets, on-account demands, spending and the year-end reconciliation.
• Maintenance: Repairs and works orders, planned and statutory maintenance, components, contractors and who pays.
• Compliance and building information: Statutory certificates and their expiry, remedial actions, Golden Thread screening, building documents and open data.
• Asset valuation: Asset classes set by finance, the yearly valuation programme run as cases, Red Book records, impairment reviews and the year-end schedule.
• Document library: Letters and notices filled in from cases, agreements and valuations, downloaded as Word to finalise and issue.

Data in and out

• Importing and exporting: Loading records from spreadsheets and downloading lists to Excel or CSV.
• Reports: Ready-made reports, building your own, sharing them and downloading to Excel.

Running PHAEMA

• Users and roles: What administrators, surveyors and viewers can do, and how to add users.
• Settings and themes: Council-wide settings, reminder timings, maps, branding, themes and accessibility.
• Change log: The permanent record of who changed what, and when.

Reference

• Glossary: Property and PHAEMA terms explained.
• About PHAEMA: Open source, open standards, data and where it is held.