New ways to manage tasks in community association management

We’re starting a brand new blog series, the Pilera Quarterly Wrap Up to give our readers a recap of the updates to our community and property management platform in the last quarter. July through September of this year was packed with many new features and enhancements. As a fun fact, we released a total of 101 updates to our software in the past three months. Some of these are on user-facing and are designed to give managers more capabilities, while some are back-end enhancements that help to improve overall performance and speed! Without further ado, let’s take a look at the latest updates we’ve added!

New Features

Board task management – Board members and staff can now collaborate on tasks with more efficiency and accountability through our new Board Task Management functionality. This is a new product and there is an additional cost to purchase it – if you’d like more information, please contact [email protected]. Here’s what you can do with this new product:
- Company Admins and Community Managers can assign Community Admins the Task Admin role to allow them the ability to create, assign, and track tasks.
- Create custom categories and subcategories for different task items.
- Managers and board members can create and assign tasks to other co-workers and board members. They can also set board member permissions for each ticket: hide, view, comment or edit & comment.
- Board members and managers can collaborate on each task. All comments and status updates are tracked within the ticket, providing a comprehensive audit trail.
- Managers and board members can filter on a variety of criteria such as community (available only to company admins, community managers, and task admins), category, subcategory, the manager or board member a task is assigned to, and date range.
- Generate custom reports to take on the go or share at a board meeting.
Unit-level document management – Managers and residents can attach documents to a unit so that only managers and that unit’s residents can access those documents. This new functionality filters and hides documents from past accounts automatically and has a dedicated units folder which is accessible to managers to track documents irrespective of the account. Residents can also add documents to their account to share with tenants they are leasing their unit to or their property managers.
Custom categories – Managers can create their own custom categories for a variety of ticket types and apply/map the categories to all communities. In addition to creating new categories, managers can also edit default categories that already exist in Pilera to meet the company or community’s needs. These ticket types are: Insurance, Occupant Activity Logs, Unit Activity Logs, Common Area Work Orders, Unit-Level Work Orders, and Task Management.
Communication-specific roles – There are now 4 new community-specific roles that give managers and board members more granular permissions. As a friendly reminder, as we add new roles, the Community Admin role will have even more restricted permissions. These new roles will help you to better customize permissions that align with your staff and board members’ duties.
- Message Admin – The Message Admin Role gives staff the capability to only send messages to the communities they are given the permission for. Any current Community Admin will be grandfathered into the Message Admin role automatically so they can continue sending communications.
- Monitoring Roles for Communications – When a manager is given the Announcement Monitor, Send Message Monitor, and/or Send Document Monitor role(s), they will receive all emails sent through those email types for the community. This new role provides visibility to managers/board members of specific emails that are being sent out. Assigning these roles will also help reduce spam to every manager in a community because they could instead give the select people the monitor role and exclude managers from the regular messages.
Vantaca Integration – Through this integration, managers will be able to bring resident data (resident record, email, phone number) and financial balances into Pilera. Residents will be able to log into the portal to view their balance and ledger and update contact information, as well as access other Pilera functionality such as events, work orders, communications, and more.

The Big Enhancements

New fields in tickets – The unit activity log, occupant activity log, and rule violation tickets now include three new fields: contact name, contact email, and the option to notify a contact by email. These fields will also now display in email notifications and downloaded reports.
Document library downloaded files – Previously, downloaded files would be placed in the browser’s download directory, causing confusion when retrieving the file. We’ve now added an “Open” file button that will open the file in a new browser window instead of automatically downloading it. Residents can then choose to download the document manually or simply view it in their browser.
Activity Logs – We’ve added a notify managers radio button in the Activity Log so that when a manager updates a comment or status, all managers can be notified.
Ticket Deep Links – All tickets (work orders, activity logs, rule violations, and task management) include a unique URL that managers or board members can use to send an email with the ticket link in it. It’s important to note that in order for a resident to view the ticket, they must be in the community, have view access to the ticket, and be logged in to view the ticket.
Message Center – Managers can now filter by year to view the message archive.

Other updates

Email Replies – We now display a warning message when sending an announcement, message, or event that if a manager does not have their email preferences turned on, they will not receive resident replies.
Resident Portal/Login
- We’ve added a unit chooser in the resident portal which easily allows residents to switch between multiple units that they own.
- “Request Login” has been changed to “Registration Request” for better clarity. Additionally, upon login failure, the Forgot Username/Password option will be highlighted.
- The verbiage has been updated to assist residents with their login.
Resident Account Filtering – We’ve updated the verbiage when a manager is in the “Move Out/Create New Account for Unit” window. When no occupant has been selected yet, managers can either select individually or click “Assign All to New Account”. When selecting an occupant, the action will be to “Confirm Remove and Reassignment”. We’ve made these verbiage changes for better clarity.
User Experience Updates
- We’ve made minor adjustments on the Personal tab of the Occupant listing.
- We’ve adjusted the font size on content editors in the communications and knowledge base.
- We’ve increased the speed of the welcome message dashboard page.
Send Message – Managers can now send a message directly in the Occupants listing page under the more actions button (denoted as the three dots).
Automatic Welcome Messages – The portal now displays if the community has automatic welcome messages turned off or on. If it is turned off and you want this capability turned on for your community(ies), please contact [email protected].
Dialing – Areas of the app have been improved for mobile to allow for dialing of resident phone numbers.

Thanks for tuning in to the Pilera Quarterly Wrap Up, and we look forward to sharing brand new updates to improve work efficiency in your communities.

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.