At recent conferences, I’ve been hearing words like “workflows”, “automation” and “AI” being thrown around. Understanding the nuances is key to making the right decisions for the future of your business. For this reason, let’s further investigate the usage of the word “workflow”.
Great technology is the difference between a simple digital checklist and automated workflows. Checklists assume that property management is completely linear—that once task A is complete, you then move on to task B, then task C and so forth.
Anyone who has worked in property management can tell you that’s an unrealistic idea of what a Property Manager’s day looks like. True workflows should discreetly automate repetitive tasks while allowing for human input. Great technology should be efficient, yet allow for the individual preferences of the customer. Or in our case, our customer’s customer.
A process that requires you to fill out a checklist is not a workflow. It’s just work.
Workflows designed for you
Known for their boundless innovation in the proptech space, and having the unique advantage of starting from a blank canvas, the founders of PropertyMe identified seven key performance areas (Communications, Leasing, Inspections, Maintenance, Bill Management, Arrears and End of Month) and created true workflows around them.
To ensure that our workflows genuinely simplify the business of property management, customer centricity is always at the core of our design philosophy. When designing workflows we put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and ask three questions:
1. Is it simple to use?
2. Does it save time?
3. Does it solve a genuine problem?
Over the past six years, we have delivered more than 1,400 new features to improve our customer’s service offering and make their lives simpler every day. We achieved this by tapping into our founders’ three decades of commitment to developing solutions for real estate companies globally.
What true workflows look like
Here are just two examples of true workflows in PropertyMe and how they have been designed for you.
Inspections
In the past, property managers would have to plan out their inspection schedule by manually calculating distances and drive times between properties to find the shortest route.
By staying true to our three product design pillars we have simplified this key performance area.
Using integrated geodata PropertyMe automatically creates a customised inspection itinerary for you, complete with distances and drive times between properties. You can simply drag and drop inspections to reorder your itinerary and once you’ve confirmed your itinerary automated notices are sent to tenants.
On average our customers save between four and 100 hours a month depending on portfolio size and team structure.
End of Month
Our end of month workflow is designed to offer a simple and time-saving solution for all business sizes and structures, whether you use in-house or outsourced trust accounting services.
Our three product design pillars of simplicity, time-saving and solving genuine problems are illustrated throughout our end of month workflow.
On a daily basis, PropertyMe identifies the owners and suppliers due for disbursement. With the click of a button PropertyMe: disburses funds; autogenerates messages with attached statements and bills; as well as updating the landlord 24/7 access page.
To manage bills simply drag and drop bills in, and PropertyMe reads all critical data points and auto-populates them for easy payment.
There is no need to log employees out or spend hours manually backing up your data because PropertyMe continuously syncs your data to the cloud while you work.
With so much discussion about whether trust accounting will remain a part of the future for property management across the various states and territories in Australia, we understand that for most it still remains an integral part of your value offering. So, for as long as our customers need this service we will continue to perfect and enhance our end of month workflow.
