Why does a Property Management company need both front and back office systems?
The goal for every property manager is to have all premises leased, with zero vacancies. Also the gap between a tenant moving out and another moving in must be minimized as much as possible. In most cases, property managers use a number of tools to achieve this. Larger companies might have different systems for front office and back office operations, smaller ones may use only excel sheets. But the processes are more-or-less similar for every PM company. I would say that despite the company’s size, all of them need to have both front and back office management systems. Why? Read below.
Front office
Front-end software should allow sales or property managers to easily manage the sales process – from the lead to the deal. Correct information about expiring lease contracts and premises’ availability should be visible in order to make the right proposals. Lucky property managers might have a situation where there are many potential tenants waiting for premises to be vacated, so they can promptly fill empty spaces in popular buildings. Such a list should be easily managed with proposals sent to select customers.
Another task for sales managers is communication with existing tenants. Newsletters or other relevant information should be easily sent to selected groups of tenants. Imagine a situation where you need to inform a building’s tenants that they won’t be able to use hot water due to some maintenance work. Gathering emails manually and creating messages can be time-consuming.
Cross-selling of additional services for tenants is another daily task for sales managers. Renting additional premises or providing more services are things that must not be lost somewhere in your excel sheets or emails. Every interaction with a tenant is important for future sales, so it’s a must to have all the communication history in one place.
Back office
When a lease agreement is signed, it goes to the back office and the sales manager’s job is done for the moment. But then it becomes a headache for accountants to manage all of the leases. Putting all of the data into the system and then creating sales invoices for each period – that can be a challenge.
Tracking tenant payments, contract expiries and other KPIs is important both for front and back-end users, so data must be consistent in both sets of software so as not to have one office rented to two different companies at the same time.
Lease agreements are directly related to accounting due to the invoicing based on the contracts, so having it separate from a back-end system can be painful. One unified system such as Soft4RealEstate is the perfect solution.
What to do?
Having the right tools can you a lot of time. Imagine your proposal becomes a contract. Why would you need to repeat everything twice? One unified system or proper integration between front and back ends would save a great deal of valuable time.
SOFT4, as a provider of a software solution for commercial property management, is constantly releasing blog articles about how to meet and cope with trends, tendencies, and challenges, and giving suggestions as to how to react to the changing environment in order to stay competitive.