We’re back with our quarterly feature wrap-up series to give you insights on what’s new in Pilera from the past three months! This past quarter, our development team has released over 70 updates to our property management software platform! Some of these updates are brand new features and integration updates to improve the way you communicate, organize tasks, schedule events, provide customer service, and more. Other updates are simple user improvements to make running your communities on our platform even smoother!

Top New Features

1) Dynamic location and people-based distribution groups

Our first update of the year, and one that our clients anticipated the most, is the dynamic location and people-based distribution groups feature.  If you’ve ever wanted to send a message to residents residing in the northeast stack of a building, your landscaping committee, or residents residing near beachside properties, you now can!

Watch the Distribution Groups video here!

Feature Highlights:

• Create any combination of streets, buildings, floors, units, and people to send messages to.
• The groups maintain themselves when a resident leaves or joins the community.  
• Send a message to multiple distribution groups at the same time.  
• Send an emergency force call.  
• Segment your messages further by the type of message (default, phone, email, or text) or user type (owner, tenant, board member, on-site manager, or manager). 

Released On: January 6, 2021
Product: Communications

2) Recurring Events

The Recurring Events has been a very popular feature request among our client base, and now we finally have it!  Save more time when creating, modifying, or deleting recurring events for frequent events you hold.  

Watch Video: New Feature Intro – Recurring Events & Distribution Groups

Feature Highlights:

• If you need to modify a recurring event, you can choose to split just this event and update it or update all events in one click.  
• Set a start and end date or choose to let the event run forever.  
• Send on-demand event notifications by location or user type.
• Updates to recurring events in the resident portal automatically update on the community website as well, eliminating double entry.

Released On: February 4, 2021
Product: Resident Portal

3) Ticket priority by age and urgency

A common request among our clients who manage a large volume of tickets is if we can provide the age of each ticket.  Last month, we modified the ticket tables for work orders, activity logs, architectural change requests, tasks, and violations so that managers can prioritize tickets by age and urgency. 

Feature Highlights:

• Priority – The priority of tickets is color-coded to provide you with a visual indicator of which tickets are the most or least urgent. 
• Age – The “Age” column which replaces the “Created Date” column shows managers how long the ticket has been open.    
• Due – See how many days are left until the ticket is due for completion or by how many days it is overdue. 

Released On: March 2, 2021
Products: Maintenance, Board+, Help Desk

4) Document library import and export

Management companies and associations can now request an import or export of their document library.  New clients that have a collection of existing documents, as well as current clients that are onboarding new communities can request an import of their documents.  Additionally, the imports and exports will honor the client’s folder structure.  

Released On: March 30, 2021
Product: Resident Portal

5) Activity Log in the Manager Dashboard

In September 2020, we released a new dashboard for managers to provide them with high-level insights on assigned and total tasks for their community.  Recently, we’ve added the ability for managers to see all their assigned activity logs and quickly access those tickets.

Released On: March 30, 2021
Product: Help Desk

6) Better customizability for reports

In our recent update, we’ve improved the ability to customize, browse, and export a variety of reports.  These reports include the Resident Report, Vehicles Report, Address Report, and Alternate Contacts Report.  

Released On: March 2, 2021

7) Share a client-level document to more than 32 communities

We’ve recently removed a restriction where managers could share a client-level document to only 32 communities.  Now, managers can share a client-level document with all of their communities if they wish. An example of a client-level document that you may want to share with your communities is the company policies document.

Released On: March 30, 2021
Product: Resident Portal

8) View occupant notes in reports

When exporting resident records in an excel file in the Resident Report, you can now include the occupant notes field so you can access that data offline.  

Released On: March 2, 2021

Feature Enhancements

Communications

Through the “Reply-To” settings, managers can set a custom “From Name” that displays as the sender name in emails.  The resident’s message center will now display the “From Name” instead of the name of the employee that sent the message. 

Maintenance

• We’ve changed the verbiage on the Work Order Summary/Detail and Print Ticket Sheets to say “Due Date”.  
• Managers can now remove a vendor from the vendor set.  
• We’ve made some user improvements to the vendor app so that it is easier to add staff and license expiration dates to a record. 

Board+

• Managers can now assign board members to architectural change requests when creating the ticket.  
• In the task management dashboard, managers can now sort their tickets by the community name when they select “All Communities” in the Community filter.  

Ticketing System

• We’ve improved the readability for longer text in the comments. 
• In the ticket dashboard, the “reset” function now defaults to a one-year range.
• When a manager comments on a ticket but makes no other changes, the assignee will receive an email notification.  We still will not display manager-only comments in emails due to privacy  

Community Websites

• It is now easier than before to create and organize the navigation of your community website.     
• We’ve enhanced the page permissions for pages and sub-pages so that you can better control who has access to what pages.  

Company Websites

Company websites are a great way to grow your business and gain an edge over the competition.  Pilera’s website features such as drag-and-drop content, lead generation forms, and built-in SEO make it easy to bring your company’s presence online.  Now, it’s even easier to request a website for your company, directly from within the Pilera app!  Once you navigate to Pilera Resources, there will be a quick form for you to fill out.

Integration Updates

QuickBooks Online

Units in a community you manage may be owned by multiple individuals.  Those owners are called primary and secondary owners.  Primary owners are added to QuickBooks as Customers whereas secondary owners are added in QuickBooks Online as Sub-Customers.  We can now bring both Customers and Sub-Customers into Pilera and display the financial balance and ledger for both.

TOPS

For our clients that use the TOPS accounting platform, you can now add the TOPS ledger module to your community websites.  Once residents log in, they can then view their balance and ledger. 

Stay tuned for more updates!

Here at Pilera, we’re always working to develop new features and enhancements to advance your company, community(ies), and the industry. Stay tuned to learn more about all of our upcoming new features right here. If you’ve missed any of our previous updates, you can always access them on our blog!

---

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? Contact us to see how Pilera’s community management suite can help your company.