Community managers working on a maintenance project.

8 Work Order Features to Improve Efficiency

Efficiency is critical in your community’s work order life-cycle process as your team handles incoming maintenance requests amongst their other community management activities. Being able to see what tickets are open, tracking a ticket from receipt to resolution, who is assigned a ticket, and informing them as well as your residents of the status helps immensely to keep your operations running smoothly.  Therefore in this month’s Manager Toolkit series, we cover eight different helpful functions in Pilera to simplify your company’s maintenance lifecycle from receipt of the issue to resolution.

1). Ticket dashboard

Whether you are a manager leading a team in a community management company or are single-handedly overseeing the maintenance work in one or a few communities you manage, it’s critical to know what needs to be done for the day.  The manager who is leading a team might be interested in the open tickets that each employee or vendor has, to determine how to best triage new work orders that come in. Or, the property manager might just want to know only about their open work order tickets and the status of each.  In Pilera’s dashboard, you can sort by all communities or one specific community, type of ticket, status, category type, who the ticket is assigned to, date ranges, subject, and more. The dashboard will also show you any work order tickets that your residents have submitted via the resident portal that still needs assignment.   

2). Cross-community search

When a resident calls in or emails management, you can use the cross-community search in Pilera to find a resident’s record in any community.  Once you’ve found the resident, click on the “Quick Add Ticket” tool to add in the details.

3). Ticket assignment

You can assign a ticket right when you’re creating it so that nothing falls through the cracks and your company improves accountability.  The ticket can be assigned to yourself, another manager, or to a vendor. Through our vendor finder tool that we’ve developed earlier this year and that’s built inside ticket creation, you can easily select the vendor who is approved to work for the community based on the type of maintenance they perform.

4). Automated communications

Once you’ve submitted a ticket, an automated email will be sent to the assignee – you, another manager, or to the vendor.  They will receive pertinent information about the ticket such as the community name, type of ticket, status, contact information, assignee, and more so they can start working on it.  

5). Status changes & comments

As you obtain updates about the maintenance ticket, it’s critical to keep your team informed.  You can update the status of the ticket from “acknowledged” to “in progress”, add a predetermined quick response or a detailed comment via templates, reassign the ticket, add attachments, or update job details.

6). Notify the contact

When you create a new ticket, update the status, or comment on a ticket, you can choose whether to notify the resident.  A recent update also gives you as managers and property management staff greater control over ticket permissions for your residents.  You can choose to have residents view, edit, or comment on maintenance tickets that pertain to their unit in the resident portal.  

7). See actions or all comments

You may need to revisit a prior ticket for several reasons: to determine whether a maintenance issue was resolved in time, resident satisfaction with how the ticket was handled, or if compliance with internal maintenance procedures were met by staff.  Audit tracking is built into each ticket, which means that you can see every action that was performed on a ticket (status, comments, and more) from receipt to resolution by simply clicking on the ticket for more details.

8). Automated or on-demand reports

Board members are interested in knowing the status of all maintenance projects being worked on for their community.  For the board member meeting, you can export a “Community Meeting Report” in PDF format display. Pilera also offers many auto-generated and on-demand reports to help you gain a deeper insight into your community operations such as stale work orders that haven’t been touched for more than 30 days.  

Key Takeaways

Through your work order system in Pilera, you can gain cross-community insights, easily assign tickets, and keep your staff, board members, and residents informed on ticket updates.  Here are your key takeaways to make Pilera’s maintenance system, work the best for you and your team:

  • In the dashboard, filter on only the information you need to start out your day.
  • As you field a call, search for the resident’s record and then click on the Quick Add Ticket tool to create a new ticket and put in all the details on the go.
  • Assign the ticket to yourself, another staff member, or a vendor and let our system take care of notifying them.
  • You can choose to automatically notify residents of an update and control visibility or editability of tickets in the resident portal.
  • Review actions performed on any ticket at any time including status changes and comments.
  • use the automated and on-demand reports to gain insight on which tickets are yet to be addressed or show off completed work during your board meetings.

We thank you for tuning in to our Manager Toolkit series and hope you enjoyed the tips on how to take your work orders to the next level.  Stay tuned as we bring you more tips and best practices on how to best use Pilera for your communities!