Streamlining HOA & Condo Maintenance Projects through Pilera’s Maintenance Tools
Tracking the progress of maintenance projects and service requests across the entire portfolio continue to be one of the biggest operational challenges for HOA and condominium managers. Thus it’s essential that the technology solution gives managers the flexibility and customization they need to adapt to varying situations and project requirements. At Pilera, our focus is not only on developing newer functionalities but adding upon our existing functionality to make our product work better for our customers.
Through our maintenance system, managers save time by reducing redundant action and increase accountability among their customer support and maintenance team. Managers can keep track of essential vendor information, apply vendors to multiple communities at once, assign work order tickets to staff or vendors, collaborate internally with other staff, notify residents, and view of the workload of their staff with our dashboard and reports.
In this blog post, we provide an overview of the tools our developers have created in 2018 that will help you gain a better insight into your operations, save time, and deliver the quality of service your residents expect.
1) Maintaining consistency through templated responses
From the abundance of incoming maintenance requests that are submitted by residents, a handful of requests may be similar in nature, thus requiring a response that is consistent with your maintenance processes. Pilera introduced a new template feature for work orders and activity logs that will help staff to maintain consistency in ticket responses to residents and internal collaboration while saving time across the board. Templated responses are a set of pre-determined work order comments that managers can create and link to multiple associations at once. This reduces the manual input of typing the same comments for similar tickets.
2) Enhanced reporting capabilities
In Pilera, options for granular reporting continue to expand. In the unit view, managers can toggle between all open and closed work orders, giving a per-home history of all maintenance work that is complete or is yet to be. This information is ideal for when managers are reaching out to residents about future work orders. Another handy tool in work order reporting is the ability to toggle between manager only comments and responses to residents in the multi-page PDF report. Ideal for company and board meetings, managers have greater control over the information that shows in their reports based on their analysis or discussion needs.
3) Work order ticket visibility for occupants
Since there are no one-size fits all solution for each individual community’s internal processes, flexibility is a necessity in a community management solution – not a luxury. In Pilera, managers have a greater degree of control when it comes to work order visibility to individual residents. While creating a work order ticket, managers can either hide the ticket, give the resident only viewing capabilities, allow them to comment on a ticket, or give them the full access to edit and comment on a ticket.
4) Easily accessible vendor information, assignment, and reporting
This past year we strengthened the integration between our vendor management (released in 2017) and work order feature. While creating a work order ticket in a specific community, managers can assign a vendor based on the category specified in the ticket. Only vendors that have been given the designated category that is selected in the ticket will be shown in the options. Additionally, managers can search for vendors by partial name or by the category. Another enhancement we’ve added is the “View in Vendor App” link which directs managers from a work order ticket to the vendor the ticket was assigned to, instantly in the vendor app. Pilera also strengthened reporting for vendor assignment. In the work order dashboard, managers can now filter tickets by a specific vendor and enhance their reporting with other powerful filters such as community, type of ticket (common or unit-level), date ranges, status (open or closed), and more. This information is great for managers to identify how many open tickets a specific vendor has at any given moment or review all closed tickets. Then, take a report on the go for a board or company meeting. The possibilities are endless.
We’ve made a vast number of new feature and enhancement updates to our community management platform in 2018. To learn more about all the updates, download the 2018 Pilera Annual Report.
