3 Ways to Implement Custom Categories
Every community has unique needs that are defined by the way it operates, governing documents, association rules, landscape, the type of resident requests that come in, and other factors. Managers who oversee a portfolio of residential communities are tasked with handling a large volume of information and requests, that differ from one community to another. That’s why we built custom categories – to give managers greater flexibility in handling a wide variety of tasks on a community level.
What are custom categories?
Custom categories are a unique set of categories and subcategories that help managers to better organize tickets/information and gain insights. These unique categories can be created for unit-level and common area work orders, unit and occupant activity logs, insurance, and new task management. In this month’s Manager Toolkit, we focus on three important ways managers can use custom categories for their communities.
How can you implement custom categories for your communities?
1. Create custom categories to meet each community’s unique needs
Managers can create custom categories for unit-level and common area work orders, unit and occupant activity logs, insurance, and new board task management. Each custom category can have a set of subcategories to further segment information. These categories can be applied to one or multiple communities at once to save time.
Furthermore, when adding a new community to Pilera, managers can select the categories they want to be displayed for that community. This feature can be found under Settings –> Custom Categories.
2. Assign vendors from the new custom categories you created to unit work orders
When managers add new categories to a unit level work order in Pilera, those categories will automatically be created in the vendor database so that new vendors can be added to the relevant category. Then, when managers choose to assign a unit work order ticket to a vendor, they can type the category in the search to select the vendor.
3. Filter on a custom category in the dashboard and generate reports
Managers and staff can gain high-level insights or minute details based on their specific needs at the moment. Using custom categories adds another level of granularity to the kinds of data managers and staff can pull from Pilera. The search results generated from the dashboard can then be used to download reports to present at company and board meetings. Take a look at these specific use cases:
- You manage over 50 apartments and you want to see all the roofing work that was done across all properties over the past year.
- Board members of a community want to see all of the tasks they assigned managers on construction bids in the past three months to prepare for the next meeting.
- Anna, a condominium manager, just arrived for work and wants to see how the day is going to be for her. From the dashboard, she checks all of the activity logs that she is responsible for following up on, from all the email inquiries they received.
Custom categories provide a higher level of granularity for managers to handle a variety of incoming tickets for their communtities and can be managed on a global and community-level. Custom categories should be created keeping community operations and management services in mind so that better informed decisions can be made from dashboards/reports and information is organized.
About Pilera
Pilera Software is the premier community and property management suite that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations. May we help your community achieve these success stories? Book a demo to see how Pilera’s community management suite can help your company.
