Maintenance and work order management are a large part of your property management team’s job. Work orders themselves are the key to maintaining efficiency and keeping your associations running smoothly.
Streamlining maintenance and work order management is crucial to boost association retention and increase portfolio profitability. But how do you grow your portfolio without diminishing your brand? Managing and maintaining additional association community spaces and facilities can stretch thin your already limited resources.
What you need is a method to bring on more associations with less overhead and employee onboarding. Read on to learn about tools to help your property managers experience next-level maintenance and work order management allowing you to scale your company profitably.
Well-Defined Work Orders Are Crucial for Maintenance Management
Whether your company manages a few or a few dozen association communities, maintenance work orders should be written clearly and processed and carried out promptly.
Work orders are documents that supply pertinent information regarding maintenance jobs and outline methods for finishing those tasks. Work orders contain details including:
- Job authorization
- Job scope
- Who it is assigned to
- Expectations
When work orders are well prepared, they allow maintenance vendors to stay on task and complete the job thoroughly and quickly. Work orders prepared manually may cost your company time and money.
How Association Management Software Accelerates Maintenance and Work Order Management
Manually processing, preparing, and tracking multiple work orders and work orders requests take precious time and resources your property managers do not have. Managers can make errors like mis-scheduling jobs, inputting the wrong information, or losing work orders. To avoid costly mistakes, implement cloud-based association management software that simplifies maintenance and work order management.
Optimize the Work Order Process
Association management software facilitates HOA and COA work maintenance and work order management processing. Homeowners can easily submit their requests online or by using a mobile app. Your association managers can then process the maintenance requests with cloud-based work order management tools, logging and tracking the remaining workflow until maintenance completion.
Cloud-based software solutions empower your managers or site administrators to generate customized online request forms to be completed by homeowners and submitted to your managers. Your property manager can then process the request. He or she can add notes, apply status changes, add images and attachments, assign a vendor, and notify the homeowner if more information is required. The system chronologically logs every step and sets due dates and alerts for effortless follow-up.
Automate Work Order Tasks
Implement a system to automate work order tasks. Give your property managers a break and let association software handle repetitive and time-consuming jobs like scheduling, communications, billing, and status updates. This frees your team to focus on value-added activities and helps you grow your portfolio without additional staff onboarding.
Save your property managers hours each day with software that includes a work order management module to open and track work orders automatically. With increased automation, your company can prevent the work order delays and errors encountered with manual input methods.
Maintain Work Order Transparency
The work order process can be complicated, with many moving parts and multiple parties involved. From the time a work order comes in, to the job’s completion, your board and homeowners need to aware of details like vendor scheduling, costs, and status updates.
Your staff does not have time to field homeowner calls regarding work order progress. Association software includes forward-facing online portals for association board members and homeowners to access at their convenience. They can utilize this customized portal to view work order photos, inspections, communications, and real-time status changes, centralized on one platform.
Offer Flexible Access Points
Property managers limited to accessing maintenance and work order information from their desktop computers cannot adequately perform their jobs. Empower your managers to make work order updates on site.
Invest in agile management software that includes an app accessible from mobile phones, tablets, or other smart devices. Equip your managers with cloud-based tools to write, review, and manage work orders from anywhere in the community. Uploaded photos, inspection reports, and vendor assignments are instantly available to board members and property managers.
Track Maintenance and Work Order Communication
Information travels fast in today’s world, and your association needs to keep up. If your property managers rely on voicemails or emails for work order communication, jobs may get lost.
Association portals and text messaging allow seamless dialogue between managers and board members. Integrated call logs and document organization software keep your work order correspondence in one centralized location, avoiding overlooked maintenance jobs.
Increased Employee Satisfaction
Property management companies of every size experience employee burnout. This is especially true for companies centered on growth. Property managers are requested to take on more work and manage more properties. Often this happens without the appropriate tools, infrastructure, or compensation. Thin profit margins prevent you from increasing salaries. Association management software can curb employee burnout and increase retention through automation, and features listed above.
Create Powerful Organizational Efficiency With Association Management Software
Association management software creates powerful efficiency for your organization, so you can scale your business without growing your headcount. Improve communication through web-based portals and fuel productivity through software automation. Cut costs by giving your team the tools it needs to perform maintenance and work order tasks more effectively. All of this adds up to improved association retention and a healthier bottom line.