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Many property management companies use property accounting software, which tracks tenants and cash flows. Far fewer companies use property maintenance software, which tracks the work necessary to keep tenants happy and properties in good condition.
Nonetheless, maintenance software offers your company significant advantages. With maintenance software, you can easily create work orders and coordinate the personnel, inventory, and equipment you need to get work done. For example, Bill Litchfield of Pier Management in Washington, D.C., uses a maintenance software from Yardi Systems. "We are not on a network, so every day the accounting department gives me a disk with current tenant and property information from the Yardi management system. I find it invaluable to pull in the information I need to create and analyze work orders," says Litchfield.
If your property management vendor offers maintenance software, you can easily correlate the maintenance task with each tenant or unit. You can retrieve tenant information from your management system to use in creating work orders, and send maintenance billing and accounting information back to your property management system for invoicing.
Currently, at least a dozen vendors offer maintenance software, ranging from basic work order entry modules to sophisticated resource tracking systems with inventory and purchase order tracking, detailed personnel information, and equipment tracking.
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM MAINTENANCE SOFTWARE
All property maintenance programs start with the work order. Good maintenance programs will let you bring up a new work order form on your computer screen with a few keystrokes, no matter what you are doing on the computer at the time. All work order software will let you enter location, date, and a description of the task to be performed.
Beyond the basics, some maintenance programs offer a variety of advanced work order features, including:
*the ability to keep extensive date, time, cost, status, equipment, category, and tenant fee information;
*retrieval of previously entered work orders;
*detailed work order reporting;
*standard work order descriptions or templates for common tasks;
*tenant invoices; and
*analysis of past work orders.
Some advanced maintenance packages also include scheduling software to tell you which employees are available for a given job; separate tracking for employees and outside contractors; and worker productivity analyses.
Finally, some packages allow you to retrieve inventory information...