Manager Toolkit

As a community manager, you’re often juggling a lot of tasks and responsibilities.  Managing the day-to-day responsibilities of a community from communicating with residents to dealing with maintenance issues can be stressful and time-consuming.  

How do you improve personal productivity to get more time back in your day?  Can your team improve overall productivity without adding more managers? 

With the right tools in place, managing a community can feel more rewarding.  HOA management software can offload routine tasks to help you boost productivity, so you can provide better service to residents.  As the year comes to a close, we wanted to share 4 ways you can boost HOA management productivity in 2023 with technology. Additionally, users of Pilera\’s HOA Management Software will gain tips to boost their productivity.

1) Automate resident communication

With modern technology, you no longer have to rely on postal mailing or email distribution lists.  You can automate resident communication by sending out mass emails, phone calls, and text messages based on their communication and language preferences.  Automated communication platforms can deliver thousands of messages within minutes, which is critical during an emergency.

Here are some productivity tips in Pilera to take your resident communications a step further:

• Use Self-Cleaning Distribution Groups – If you regularly need to communicate with individuals in a social events committee or with those who reside near lakeside properties, we recommend creating distribution groups.  You can create message groups based on people or location.  The group will automatically update itself as residents join or leave the community.  The self-cleaning nature of distribution groups in Pilera eliminates the need to manage lists manually. 
• Create templates – When you need to reuse content regularly or make sure that your message is consistent across your organization, we recommend creating templates.  Templates allow you to create a message for phone, email, text, or letter to save for future use.  
• Reference your real-time analytics and message archives – You no longer have to wonder if a resident received your message or dig through your email to find their response.  With Pilera’s real-time analytics on message delivery, you will know whether a resident has received your email, text, or picked up a phone call.  Our platform also keeps an automatic archive of every message that was sent and tracks resident replies to your emails.

Resource: 5 Ways Clients Improved Their Communication with Pilera

2) Team Collaboration

According to studies, 1 in 4 employees says there is a lack of collaboration in their company.  Do you often find that resident requests and board tasks are being tracked in different places by different employees?  If so, you may be noticing a decline in productivity – tasks slip through the cracks and you’re regularly chasing down staff for an update.  

However, with a client service ticketing system, you can improve communication and collaboration with your team, board members, and residents.  A ticketing system improves your HOA management productivity by enabling you to distribute responsibilities, communicate with staff, and track tasks. 

Here are some tips in Pilera to collaborate more effectively with your team:

• Assign responsibilities – Assigning tasks ensures that nothing slips through the cracks.  When you assign a task to a member of your team, Pilera automatically sends an email notification.  
• Communicate internally – As a task progresses, it’s important to keep your team informed.  You can communicate with other managers through comments and choose to notify them by email.  Pilera keeps an automatic history of all status changes, assignee changes, and comments so everyone knows what was done.

3) Managing your time more efficiently

As a community manager, your day may not go as planned.  That’s why you need to have insight into your tasks at a glance so you can prioritize them.  A ticketing system should help you to monitor and manage your workload at any given time. Knowing where you stand with your tasks can help you plan the day better and improve your productivity. 

Here are some tips in Pilera to help you manage your time more efficiently:

• Prioritize your work – The manager dashboard in Pilera helps you set expectations with a live snapshot of all your work at a community or portfolio level.  You can prioritize your tasks by urgency, age, or due date.
• Manage team workload – The business analytics report in Pilera enables you to understand employee performance better and shift workload where it’s needed.  The number of open, closed, and assigned tasks provides insight into which employees may be overwhelmed or who could be given more work.

4) Promote resident self-service

A great way to boost your HOA management productivity is to encourage resident self-service through a portal.  In a community portal, residents can submit and track requests, update their contact information, and view community information without ever having to contact the management office.  You can keep residents informed with little effort on your part!     

Here are some tips to boost HOA management productivity with Pilera\’s resident portal:

• Keep community information up-to-date – Today, your residents prefer to search online for information before they call the management office.  That’s why it’s important to always keep information in the portal up to date.  You can upload the latest documents, events, knowledge base articles, community contacts, and more to keep them informed. 
• Update resident requests – Keep residents informed on the status of their work orders, ACRs, violations, and support tickets with automated email notifications. Furthermore, you can encourage your residents to log into the portal to view updates at their own time and convenience. 

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About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management software that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations. To learn how Pilera can help to improve operations, book a personalized demo. Or, if you are a customer, write to us at [email protected] with any questions.

As a community manager, keeping up with the daily operations of the community requires you to wear many hats.  You have to enforce community rules, resolve work order issues, and work on any requests that residents and board members send your way. You’re regularly interacting with residents, vendors, board members, and other staff members. When dealing with all your responsibilities, important tasks may get lost in the shuffle.

Community managers facing these challenges can benefit from a Client Service Ticketing platform that can help their team improve efficiency and increase resident satisfaction.  In this article, you’ll learn about what a client service ticketing solution is and how you can leverage it to keep your team organized. 

What is a Client Service Ticketing solution?

A Client Service Ticketing solution helps you track resident-submitted requests and internal tasks for the communities you manage.  It can automate routine tasks such as opening, prioritizing, and closing resident or community issues.  

With a Client Service Ticketing solution, you can track a variety of issues in one place:

• Maintenance – Unit and Common Area work orders
• Architectural Change Requests
• Resident support
• Unit activity logs
• Rule violations
• Board and Management Tasks

As we’ve listed out here, a Client Service Ticketing solution enables you to track a wide range of issues.  Continue reading on to learn about the top three ways a Client Service Ticketing solution can benefit your company.

Benefits of a Client Service Ticketing solution

1) Better team organization

In a study, 4 in 10 employees say that there is a lack of collaboration in their company.  A Client Service Ticketing solution enables teams to improve team collaboration by planning out their day, assigning responsibilities, and communicating internally with other team members.  

Here’s how Pilera can help you improve team organization:

• Set expectations by being able to view a live snapshot of all assigned tasks across the communities you manage in an easily filterable dashboard.
• Assign tickets to managers, board members, and vendors so that everyone knows what they are responsible for.  Focus on what is most important by filtering the dashboard by assignee, priority, and due dates.  
• Communicate internally with your team through automated email notifications on ticket assignments, comments, or status changes.  That way, the right employees, board members, and vendors are notified.  

2) Increase resident satisfaction

Residents often complain about a lack of communication or delay in receiving responses to their requests.  A Client Service Ticketing system provides self-service features for residents while making it easy for managers to organize all of their requests in one place.  This allows you to keep an open line of communication with your residents and provide faster responses to their requests.  

Pilera’s ticketing system can help you achieve better resident satisfaction rates by:

• Encouraging residents to submit requests online, attach photos or documents, view updates to their requests, or reply back to managers.
• Providing residents with a fully searchable knowledge base where they can find answers directly in the community portal without having to call the management office. 
• Tracking every interaction with your residents with a real-time audit trail so you always know what occurred and what the resolution was. 

3) Grow your business without increasing costs

According to studies, 1 in 3 business leaders agrees that automating technology can save 10-50% of labor costs.  A Client Service Ticketing system empowers you to grow your business without having to add more managers.  In our recent Client Satisfaction Survey, management companies reclaimed between $5K and $35K in efficiency per staff member per year, depending on the size of their company.  

Here’s how Pilera can help you propel business growth:

• Retain happier association clients by showing them the value you provide through business analytics reports on open and closed tickets.
• Easily justify price changes with reports that show you how much work each community generates over time.   

Conclusion

Keeping track of all resident requests and community tasks can be a challenge, but Client Service Ticketing platforms can make it easier for your team.  A Client Service Ticketing platform empowers your team to improve organization, deliver a better resident experience, and grow your business.  If you’re intrigued to learn how Pilera’s Client Service Ticketing system can work for you, book a personalized demo or speak with an expert today.

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Note: This article was updated in March 2024 to reflect new features and strategies to help our clients better streamline their maintenance process.

Solving maintenance issues in the community is a vital part of your daily work as a manager or board member, but it can often be time-consuming too.  Your work involves noting down requests from residents, reaching out to your vendors or in-house maintenance team, and scheduling work, all the while keeping residents updated.  

Work order platforms, like Pilera, can help you streamline your maintenance process and offload many time-consuming tasks.  Integrated work order and vendor management solutions reduce paperwork and inbound calls to the office, give your team real-time information, and help reduce liability. 

In this blog article, we will share 7 tips to help you reduce workload in your maintenance process through Pilera.  By offloading many routine tasks, you can reclaim time to focus on more important projects. 

In our latest client satisfaction study, our clients regained anywhere between $5K – $35K per employee per year in time savings, depending on the size of their company.   Read on to discover tips to save your team time.  

1) Encourage residents to submit maintenance requests

Answering phone calls about maintenance issues can take up a lot of time in your day.  Giving your residents an easy, convenient way to submit unit and common area maintenance requests can save time for your team.  In Pilera, your residents can add a description and photo to their maintenance request.  It eliminates a lot of back-and-forth communication and your team can start the maintenance work more quickly.  As your team progresses through the work order, you can keep residents updated with comments in the portal and automatic email notifications.  This eliminates the need for residents to call your office for an update.  

Resource: How a Resident Portal Reduces Staff Workload

2) Keep residents informed on common area maintenance repairs

Keeping common areas functional within the communities you manage is not just about aesthetics – it\’s about improving resident enjoyment of the community\’s shared spaces, the community\’s public appeal, and safety. From landscaping to pool areas, well-managed clubhouses, and gyms, clean and operational common areas improve the resident\’s quality of life in the community. To that end, it\’s also important to keep residents informed about ongoing common area repairs and improvements. An effective way to keep them informed is to share access to view common area tickets. This allows residents to stay informed about updates and report issues they notice. It also helps prevent repeated reporting of the same issues, as they are already aware of what\’s been addressed or currently worked on.

In Pilera, residents can view a list of common area work orders and submit their own tickets for management review as well. Additionally, you can keep residents in the loop by providing status updates as repairs progress.

3) Provide residents with instructions before they submit a ticket

Continuous back-and-forth communication about a resident’s work order can cause delays.  Another way to save time is through ticket alerts in Pilera.  Ticket alerts are instructions that you can add to the top of a work order submission.  For example, many communities use this alert to provide instructions to submit a work order or inform residents to call the maintenance hotline for emergencies.  This feature reduces your workload because it allows for more complete and accurate submissions. 

4) Create work orders in bulk – New in 2023!

When you need to create multiple work order tickets at the same time, the new bulk ticket creation can be a time-saver! You can now power through your work faster and save time by creating tickets in bulk. There are two ways you can do this:

• You can use the \”Duplicate\” option if you have similar tickets you need to create at the same time. When using this feature, our system automatically populates the description, assignee, and other settings from your previous work order and you can adjust them if needed. For example, you can leverage this feature if you have a similar type of tickets that you need to create for different units/residents.
• Alternatively, you can save and create another ticket. This option enables you to create a new ticket after you\’ve finished creating the current ticket.

5) Better communication with staff and vendors

Communication is vital to the success of your maintenance efforts.  When you communicate effectively with other staff members and vendors, you can complete work on time and improve response times to residents.  In our study, some of the biggest hurdles were communication-related.  Back-and-forth emails with residents and staff made it difficult to find information.  Furthermore, many managers would individually contact each vendor to let them know about work orders that needed to be completed.  

There are 4 powerful features in Pilera that help your team improve communication internally, and with vendors and residents.  

• Ticket assignment – You can assign work orders to other staff and vendors, so everyone knows who is responsible for what.  
• Comments – Managers can communicate with each other directly on the work order as it progresses.  All of the communications, along with status and assignment changes, are stored in Pilera with our audit-tracking feature.  That way, no outdated information is passed around and you know what was done.  
• Email notifications – Keep everyone informed on the work order as it progresses.  When you update a work order, you can choose who gets notified. 
• Email Reply Tracking (NEW in 2023) –  When vendors reply to your work order email in Pilera, their response will automatically be tracked in the Message Center! With this new feature, you no longer need to search through long email chains to find out what a vendor said to you!

Resource: Benefits of Pilera’s Collaborative HOA Software

6) Create ticket comments for common responses

If you have common responses that you send to residents or other staff members, the ticket comment feature will save you time.  These are common responses you can create for your staff to add as ticket updates.  It saves your team time from repeating the same information across all your communities.  

Here are a few common examples:

• Inform residents if a work order they submitted is not the responsibility of the association.
• Let other managers know that you’re still waiting for a response from the vendor.
• Let residents know that their work order has been approved, waiting on a part, or that the work order has been completed.

7) Distribute workload effectively & gain high level insights 

When your team receives so many work order requests, they may start to feel overwhelmed.  It\’s important to evenly distribute the workload so you can help them perform their best.  

Take a look at some ways in which you can gain high-level operational insights within Pilera to make more informed decisions about workload and staffing:

Visual Charts

In 2023, Pilera added new ticket charts that empower you with valuable insights for better community or company decision-making. These insights include:

• Understand trends over time with open vs closed tickets.
• Get a breakdown of ticket priorities so you can manage your team\’s workload effectively.
• Breakdown of open,closed, and deleted tickets.
• Stay on top of ticket progress with a breakdown of statuses such as any, new, acknowledged, in progress, in review, on hold, completed, canceled, rejected or deleted.
• Manage workloads by reviewing tickets assigned to managers, board members, and vendors.

Business Analytics Report

Business analytics reports in Pilera help you manage your employees’ workload more efficiently.  They give you a breakdown of all open and closed tickets by community and employee.  These reports help you make decisions, such as whether you need additional staff to handle a community or which employees have too many tasks.  

Automated Reports

Pilera also sends out a weekly automated report on new work orders and old work orders that aren\’t complete.  Through this report, your team can stay organized and avoid tasks from being forgotten. 

Conclusion

In a fast-paced workplace like community management, it’s important to find creative ways to save your team time.  Offloading tasks to technology platforms, no matter how big or small can give you hours back in your day.  Through Pilera’s maintenance platform, you can organize work orders, improve communication, reduce response times, and ultimately, bring more efficiency to your team.

Connect with us

Interested in learning how Pilera’s maintenance platform can work for you?  Book a personalized demo or contact us at [email protected]. 

Already a Pilera user and want to learn more about our maintenance platform?  Write to us at [email protected].          

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Free Download: Pilera Client Satisfaction Ebook

Greetings!  We’re back with a new Manager Toolkit post this month, where you will learn about three new ticketing enhancements. Through these enhancements, you\’ll be able to manage your tickets better and quicker! These features are now available for all ticket types – work orders, support, architectural change requests, unit activity logs, rule violations, and tasks.   

Manage Attachments

In Pilera, it is now easier to manage attachments in a ticket.  You can now remove an attachment from a ticket.  This is especially helpful when you need to replace an outdated file with a new one or remove an incorrect file.  We’ve also made it quicker for managers to add more attachments without needing to edit a ticket.

Since Pilera tracks every action taken on a ticket, you can easily see a history of which files were removed/added, when, and by whom in the events section.   

Edit & Delete Ticket Comments

Many of our customers requested the ability to edit and delete comments within a ticket.  We’re excited to announce that this feature is now live!  When you edit or delete a comment, Pilera automatically tracks the changes in the events section of the ticket.  Then, you’ll always have a history of what has been done.   

Quicker Access to Tickets from Your Email

We understand that efficiency and speed are vital to your customer service process and that’s why we’ve made it easier for you to access a specific ticket from within your email.  Now, when you receive an email notification about a ticket, there is a direct link for you to access that ticket.  Direct access to the ticket does require logging into Pilera so you can view the details, comment on the ticket, reassign it, and more.  If you are already logged into Pilera, you will be taken to that ticket directly.  However, if you haven’t logged in yet for the day, you will be prompted to log in.        

Thanks for tuning in for this month’s Manager Toolkit on the new ticket feature enhancements!  We’ll be back with more tips and best practices on how to use Pilera for your communities. Want to view more tips and best practices on topics such as communication, maintenance, customer support, and more? Visit our Manager Toolkit library!

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About Pilera 

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management software that has helped thousands of community managers enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations. To learn how Pilera can help to improve efficiency and reduce costs, book a personalized demo. 

Good communication is the foundation of any community\’s success. When you communicate regularly and effectively with residents, you can keep them informed, safe, and invested in the community they call home.  Effective communication between board members and managers keeps everyone organized, improves efficiency, and reduces costs for the community. Technology plays an important part in streamlining your HOA messaging efforts – from delivering messages instantly to ensuring your message reaches the right residents.

We recently surveyed our clients on their communication processes and the specific features in Pilera that are instrumental to their success.  In this month’s Manager Toolkit, we\’re thrilled to share 5 main ways our clients improved their outreach with Pilera.  We’ll also share some quick tips and resources to level up your communication efforts.   

1) Multi-Channel Communications

A multi-channel communication strategy is important to our client\’s success in keeping residents informed. As residents’ needs evolve, communicating through one channel may not be effective enough.  Thus, it\’s essential to use a mix of traditional and electronic communication methods to increase reach. For example, text messages are immediate and non-intrusive, making them a very popular choice among residents.  Alternatively, for residents who do not have other means of electronic communication, managers can reach out through automated phone calls or postal mail.  

Having many ways to communicate also helps your community to comply with local regulations or bylaws.  For example, Nevada state requires that HOAs send out postal mail to their residents.  In contrast, Florida state requires condos with more than 150 units to provide website or portal access for residents to view important documents.   

Pilera Quick Tips:

Tip #1: Let your residents choose how they want to hear from you

Encourage your residents to choose how they want to hear from you.  When you send out a welcome message to residents, let them know they can select among phone, email, text, and postal mail.  Your automated welcome letter is also a good opportunity to set expectations on what type of messages you\’ll be sending them. You can also have paper forms in the office for your residents to fill out in the event they do not have an email or electronic communication on record. 

Tip #2: Send messages at scale

In Pilera, you can send out mass messages through email, phone, and text.  You can also generate PDF letters that you can upload to a third-party solution such as SouthData for postal mailing.  

\”I think our annual meeting attendance and/or return of proxies has been higher with Pilera communications as we use the follow-up reminders very regularly.\”

Kirsten Capps, Forest Green Realty

Resource: 9 Tools to Communicate With Your Residents

2) Fast and Reliable 

Our clients have shared that one of the biggest benefits to Pilera Communications is speed and reliability.  Being able to send mass email, phone, and text messages quickly is vital during an emergency, where there’s no time to lose.  

A reliable communication system ensures that your message gets delivered when it needs to.  That means you can be confident that your message is delivered even in the toughest conditions, such as a local outage or storm.  Here at Pilera, we take the deliverability of your message seriously.  Behind the scenes, our team is working to maintain message reputation so that your message is delivered every time. As of the time of this writing, Pilera has a 100% message reputation for email delivery.  

Pilera Quick Tips:

Tip #1: Use Reverse911 Functionality for emergency messages

When you need to send an urgent message to residents, select “Emergency” as the message type.  The emergency setting overrides the resident’s communication preference, thereby sending them phone calls, emails, and text messages.  When residents receive a phone call, for example, we specify that it is an emergency message from their community.  

Tip #2: Easily detect invalid contact information

Ensuring you have the most accurate contact information is vital to your outreach efforts. Oftentimes, a residents\’ email may bounce or a text number may become invalid. In these instances, Pilera helps you identify incorrect contact information in 3 different ways:

• Automated monthly email – Managers receive a monthly email with invalid emails and text numbers.  
• Real-time in the app – View incorrect contact information in the app in real-time on the Occupants page.  Visual indicators show resident communication preferences, which contact information is invalid, and if they have unsubscribed.  
• Resident profile pages – Individual resident profiles give you more insights on the exact contact issues and ways to correct them.  

We recommend encouraging your residents to self-update their information in the resident portal so you will have the most accurate information.  Residents can set their communication preferences, and update their phone, email, or text information. Additionally, they can even add alternate or emergency contacts.

Resource: How Pilera Communications Can Support Your Community’s Emergency Preparedness Plan

3) Save Time & Increase Productivity

Automated technology offloads many time-consuming processes, such as manually organizing your recipient lists or creating your message content.  In a recent survey we conducted, 89% of our clients say that saving time with Pilera Communications frees their staff to provide additional services to residents.  Your employees are more productive as a result of these time savings, and your residents will be more satisfied with the services you provide the community. 

Pilera Quick Tips

Tip #1: Create different templates for different needs

Templates allow you to compose a phone, email, text, or letter and save it for future use.  When you need to reuse content on a regular basis or make sure your message is consistent across all your employees that send out communications, templates can be really handy. You can also create templates for different communication needs.  For example, you can create a template for messages about an upcoming Board meeting that you want to send through text only.  Or, let’s say you want to create a monthly newsletter to distribute to your residents.  Some of your residents prefer email while others appreciate receiving postal mail. You can send the newsletter based on your resident\’s preference so no one is left out.

Tip #2: Schedule communications in advance

In Pilera, you can schedule messages up to two weeks in advance down to a few minutes.  That way, you don’t miss out on sending a message. 

\”Using Pilera saves on paper and time for someone to post messages on doors. I can send out a message right away to the buildings, the entire property, or to an individual with short notice. I love Pilera!\”

Mindy Barclay, Axiom Property Management

Resource: How to save time and increase productivity with Pilera Communications

4) Reduce hidden expenses

It’s important to make your communications process efficient so that you can save more on your community’s budget.  Keeping unnecessary costs down can save not only your association money but residents\’ money too.  Communities incur hidden costs in data management, physical mailing, and handling inbound calls.  In our survey, 79% of our clients expressed that they have been able to lower hidden expenses and save money after sending messages through Pilera. 

Pilera Quick Tips:

Tip #1: Integrate your accounting with an HOA communications solution

When you integrate your accounting platform with an HOA communications solution, you can reduce manual data input and human errors.  Automatic sync between your accounting platform and Pilera ensures you have the most accurate resident contact data.  Pilera has a two-way integration with most accounting partners. 

Tip #2: Keep your recipient list up to date

Through Pilera’s distribution groups, you can segment your list by any combination of location and residents to send a message.  One of the most important aspects of Pilera’s distribution group is that it is self-maintaining.  That means, the list cleans itself as residents move in and move out of a community.  That means you’re not sending messages to a resident who has moved out, thereby reducing your community’s liability to lawsuits.  

Resource: A complete guide on how to reduce expenses in your communication strategy

5) Improve transparency and visibility

Transparency in your communication strategy is key to staying organized, keeping your staff in the loop, and helping new or substitute staff get up to speed.  In our client survey, managers expressed they were able to improve visibility into their operations by communicating through Pilera.  

Pilera Quick Tips:

Tip #1: Measure your communication efforts

The Message Center in Pilera gives your team visibility into the communications that have been sent out, when, and by whom.  You can also view the delivery statistics of your messages in real-time, including which residents:

• Clicked on an email or replied
• Opened a text message
• Picked up a live call or were sent a voicemail
• Have a PDF letter generated for them. 

Pilera also sends out a monthly communications usage report straight to your inbox detailing how many communication credits each community used.  With this information, you can better understand current communication usage and forecast future needs.

Tip #2: Keep your staff in the loop

If certain staff members or board members need to receive a copy of the messages you send out in Pilera, you can set the Message or Announcement Monitor role for them.  They will automatically start to receive messages anytime you communicate with the community. 

\”People like having the ability to send notices themselves if they would like, so Board members like that they can be added as \”managers\” so that they can send announcements themselves if it is after hours for us.\”

Peyton Tinder, Sentry Management

Resource: 6 Steps to Improving Transparency in Your Communication Efforts with Pilera

Conclusion: Level up your HOA messaging with Pilera

With communication being a vital part of your community operations, it\’s important that your technology enables you to keep residents informed while increasing staff efficiency and reducing overall costs. Our management company and community clients save time and money with Pilera\’s Communications, empowering them to focus on what matters. Here\’s a recap of the 5 ways our clients improved their communications efforts with Pilera:

1. Multi-Channel Communications – Reach a wider demographic and empower residents to choose how they want to hear from management.
2. Fast & Reliable Communications – Communicate with residents instantly during an emergency with a Reverse911 functionality that overrides resident preference and sends phone, email, and text.
3. Save Time & Increase Productivity – Automate many time-consuming tasks with templates and message scheduling so you can have more time in the day for essential tasks.
4. Reduce Hidden Expenses – Reduce the cost of manual data entry and potential liability by having the most accurate contact information with accounting integration and self-maintaining distribution groups.
5. Improve Transparency and Visibility – Keep your entire organization in the loop with access to message history and delivery analytics so that your team knows what was done.

\”We\’ve taken on a number of properties that complained that their previous management company handled communication poorly. They have all been very impressed by howe well we are able to communicate with Pilera.\”

Bob Keegan, Dirigo Management Company

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About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management software that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations. To learn how Pilera Communications can help to improve your staff efficiency and reduce costs, book a personalized demo or you can also write to us at [email protected]. Or, if you are a customer, write to us at [email protected] with any questions about implementing these steps for your community today.

Do you often ask a fellow community manager if they sent out a message about an upcoming event yet?  Do you often struggle to find a message about maintenance you sent out months ago?  Or, is it challenging to figure out which residents are not receiving your messages or not opening them, and why?

Managers and board members often struggle with improving transparency in their communication strategy.  When companies lack visibility into their communication efforts, they can lose up to $62.4 million in productivity according to Ring Central.  A lack of visibility into your communication efforts can also lead to a decline in resident satisfaction and even the potential for liability.  In contrast, having visibility into your communications efforts means you can:  

• Keep your team on the same page and thus deliver a better resident experience.  
• Identify successes in your communications strategy that you can repeat.
• Identify areas in your communication strategy that you need to improve on. 
• Protect your community from potential liability. 

In this post, we will cover 6 steps in Pilera you can take to gain visibility in your communication efforts.

1) Designate responsibilities

The first step to improving transparency in your communications efforts is to designate responsibilities.  This way, you can set clear expectations on who will be responsible for communicating with residents.  

User roles in Pilera enable you to designate different responsibilities for employees based on what actions they need to perform.  User roles also keep your staff and board members in the know when it comes to your communication efforts.  

We recommend setting these three important roles:

• Message Admin – These are the individuals in your organization who will be responsible for managing communications with owners, tenants, other occupants, and board members.  They can send announcements and manage messages in the Message Center.   
• Announcement monitor – These individuals will receive a copy of every announcement that you send out.  For example, you can set this role for your Board Members to keep them informed of every announcement you send.  
• Message monitor – These individuals will receive a copy of every message that is sent out through the “Send Message” feature.

2) Fix invalid resident contact information to improve message deliverability

Your residents\’ text numbers or emails may change from time to time, so it’s vital that your database has the latest information.  Not having accurate contact information will adversely affect your message deliverability.  It also means your residents aren’t receiving your messages and that could result in a potential lawsuit.  

Here at Pilera, we take the delivery of your messages seriously and offer many ways for you to identify which residents aren’t receiving your messages and why.  Let’s take a look at each way.  

Occupant Search

The occupant search page lists all of the residents in your community.  Next to each resident’s name is a visual indicator that shows their communication preferences and contact information failures at a glance.  

Resident Profile

In each individual resident’s profile, you can view the resident’s contact information, preferences, and failure reasons in detail. 

Monthly reports

Each month, managers receive a report on invalid contact information directly to their inbox.  This report compiles a list of residents with invalid text numbers and email addresses so that managers can fix them.

Message Center

Within the Message Center, you can also view the success or failure of each outgoing message.  Real-time analytics show if a resident\’s email has bounced or if a text number is undeliverable.

3) Focus your message on only those who need it

When communicating with your residents, it’s important to send specific messages to only those who need them through segmentation.  That helps you to build trust with your residents while ensuring they aren’t frustrated by receiving messages that don’t impact them. Repeated, unimportant messages or stimuli can result in residents missing actual important messages.

In Pilera, you can segment your message by location (drilled down to the unit), user type (board, tenant, owner, other occupants, manager, etc), and by a specific distribution group.  Then, there are two ways you can confirm your recipients before pushing “send”:

Distribution Group Preview 

As you create your distribution group, you can view all the residents included in that group.

Send Announcement/Message Preview 

When you use the Preview & Send option in Send Announcement, you can confirm which residents will receive a message and if they will receive it by phone, text, email, or PDF letter generation. 

4) Build trust with your residents

Trust and transparency are key to operating a community smoothly.  When you communicate frequently and consistently, residents are less likely to call the office with questions or complaints.  The more informed your residents are, the more productive and organized your team will be.  

How you can build trust through Pilera’s communications:

• Encourage residents to manage their own communication preferences and contact information.  This way they can always count on receiving messages the way they want.
• Roll out the resident portal to your community so that residents can access past messages and all important community information. Our clients include a link to the resident portal in their email signature so they can increase resident signups to the portal.
• Know when a resident has changed their contact information, that way you can verify they’ll be receiving your next message.  Pilera sends an email notification to the main manager contact whenever a resident updates their contact information. 
• Keep residents informed on their customer support, maintenance, and ACR requests. 

5) View the message center regularly

Knowing what messages have been sent out to your community is key to improving visibility in your communication efforts.  A communications archive that is easily accessible can benefit your community in numerous ways:

• It reduces the back and forth communication among employees, including those working after-hours.  If a staff member is out or has left the company, others will know what was done.
• A substitute manager who usually doesn’t manage a community can check the message center so they can respond to resident queries or complete other tasks.
• Reduce the community’s risk to liability.   

Improving accountability with Message Center:

Every message you send out through Pilera is automatically archived in the Message Center.  You can view a history of all messages sent and sort by the message category.  Each individual message displays the following details:

• The message content
• Who sent the message
• When the message was sent
• All recipients with delivery and open status.  

6) Measure your communication efforts

After sending out your messages, it’s important to measure your efforts.  Identify the successes in your communication efforts and what you can improve.  For example, if residents are consistently getting your emails but not opening them, you may need to improve the subject lines.  Or, if inbound calls to the office have increased after you send a message, that may indicate that your message needs more details.  

In Pilera, you can measure your communication efforts through real-time analytics and communication usage reports.

Real-Time Analytics

The Message Center provides delivery analytics of your messages in real-time.  You can see who clicked on or replied to an email, received a text message, or picked up a live call.  

Communication Credits Report

This report details how many messages each community in your portfolio is sending out on a monthly basis.  Through this report, you can easily identify which communities are communication superstars and which aren’t sending out enough.  

Conclusion:

Transparency is vital to your communication efforts right from creating your recipient lists to evaluating the success of your efforts.  Pilera Communication helps to improve visibility within your organization and build trust with residents.  As a recap, you learned about these 6 steps that are important to transparent communication efforts:

1. Designate Responsibilities – Assign someone the responsibility of managing communications with the Communication Admin role.
2. Fix Invalid Contacts – Managers can easily identify which resident contact information is invalid so they can fix it and improve message delivery. 
3. Message Segmentation – When creating your recipient lists or sending out a message, you can confirm all the residents who are going to receive it before hitting send. 
4. Build trust with your residents – Encourage your residents to update their communication preferences and contact information so they are always informed and you are always up to date. 
5. View communications history – Your managers will be on the same page when they know which communications have been sent out with an automatic archive.   
6. Measure Communication Efforts – Real-time message delivery analytics track whether a resident has opened or replied to an email, received a text message or listened to a voice call.  Communication usage reports show which communities are communicating the most, and which could improve their efforts. 

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About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier property management software that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel improve communication and customer service. Request a personalized demo so you can learn how Pilera’s community management suite can increase work efficiency for your company.

Communication is a vital part of managing a community, but it is oftentimes challenging and time-consuming.  When sending out messages or notices to your community it’s important to ask questions, such as:  

• How effective are your current communication tools in saving you and your staff time?  

• Is your communication tool flexible enough to meet each communitys\’ diverse needs?  

If you are using outdated technology or processes, it’s likely that your staff are burdened with repetitive tasks that impact their productivity.  When management companies leverage a communications platform that is both easy to use and flexible, it makes a manager’s job easier.  Pilera\’s communication platform offers many ways to manage your community outreach more efficiently.  We recently surveyed our clients to learn how they save time with Pilera.  In this post, we share these insights with you. 

How Pilera’s Communication Platform Saves Time & Increases Productivity

Our clients have seen many improvements to their team’s productivity as they transitioned to digital communications.  From our survey, 67% of managers saved 7 hours per week, on average with Pilera’s communication tools.  89% of managers also stated that these time savings freed up their staff to address other important issues or provide additional services for their clients.  Let’s dive into the top ways our clients save time with Pilera’s communication tools and how you can as well.

Automate mass communications

Many of our clients shared with us that communicating with residents before using Pilera involved hand-delivering letters or posting notes on doors.  Shifting to automated digital communications allows them to save time while reaching residents instantly.  By automating phone, email, and text, managers can reduce manual work. Pilera makes 80 phone calls a minute. Let\’s say that a manager can make one individual phone call every two minutes. That\’s 5.5 hours saved that a manager could dedicate to other important issues!

Mindy Barclay at Axiom Property Management says, “Using Pilera saves on paper and time for someone to post messages on doors. I can send out a message right-a-way to the buildings, the entire property, or to an individual [within short] notice.” 

We automatically maintain your recipient lists 

Residents frequently move in or move out of a community, which means your recipient list needs to be up to date.  Some of our clients previously used an email marketing service like Constant Contact or Outlook to manage their recipient lists.  Managers would manually add or remove residents from the list, and then copy/paste the contacts in the BCC field.  Pilera’s distribution groups are self-maintaining, which means that when a resident moves in or out, the list is automatically updated.

Segment your lists with distribution groups

Managers often need to only message certain groups of residents, not the entire community.  With email BCC or other email platforms, managers needed to either categorize contacts beforehand or individually select contacts that need to receive the message.  Pilera’s distribution groups are designed for the property management industry. This makes it easier to send more targeted messages over contact-based email platforms.  You can create any combination of location and/or residents to form a message group such as a landscaping committee or homes with a basement.  Simply choose the streets, buildings, floors, units, or residents that you want in the group and start messaging them.  

Our clients especially like the ease with which they can create these groups and reuse them.  Carly Melius from Professional Association Services, Inc. in California, says “I have been able to single out stacks for water shut offs and ease of sending to just certain people within an HOA, or an entire HOA if needed, I am able to duplicate and send out multiple of the same for reminders that has helped for when doing inspections and need access to units.”  

Scheduling communications ahead of time

Scheduling messages in advance helps you to stay ahead. Especially if a message needs to go out after-hours or when you\’re out of the office. With Pilera, you can schedule messages up to 2 weeks in advance to ensure timely delivery.   

Save frequent messages as templates

If you need to communicate important information on a frequent basis such as water shutoffs, templates can come in handy.  Our clients like that they can save their email, text, phone, and PDF letter content as a template to reuse when needed.  It saves staff time by eliminating the need to copy and paste content from another source every time they need to send the same type of message.  Templates also help to keep the message consistent if you have multiple staff handling communications. 

Email residents across your entire portfolio

For companies that manage a portfolio of HOA, Condo, or Apartment communities, the Multi-Community Announcement feature is a massive time-saver.  You can send out bulk email announcements to your entire portfolio or a handful of communities.  To send more targeted messages, you can segment your recipients by type of user. Many of our clients use this feature to send an email blast to board members across their portfolio, but you can email owners and tenants too.

Recap

When your communications platform offloads time-consuming activities such as managing your lists or sending out messages, you can free staff to address other important issues.  Pilera’s communication platform enables your staff to improve community outreach and efficiency at the same time.  Here’s a recap:

1. Automated communications – Send out mass email, phone, and text messages to your communities with just a few clicks.  
2. Distribution Groups – Create message groups with any combination of residents and locations that you can reuse when needed. The self-maintaining nature of our distribution groups keeps your list up to date. 
3. Advanced scheduling – Stay ahead of your outreach efforts by scheduling messages up to 2 weeks in advance.
4. Templates – Create templates for frequent messages you need to send and reuse them when needed.
5. Multi-community announcements – Send an email blast to your entire portfolio or a handful of communities and segment by the type of user. 

Video: Improve Your Community Communications with Pilera

Pilera has helped thousands of communities to increase communications with residents, while also improving staff productivity.  If you’d like to learn more about how Pilera can work for you, book a personalized demo, or contact us at [email protected].  

As you get ready for your annual board meeting, you know that improving resident attendance to reach quorum is critical.  But reaching a quorum can be challenging, and definitely doesn’t happen overnight.  It takes effort over time to interest and engage residents. Transparent communication and giving them more ways to be involved are essential.  In this blog post, you will learn how Pilera’s community management software can help you increase your HOA board meeting attendance to reach your required quorum.  

6 Ways to Increase HOA Board Meeting Attendance & Reach Quorum with Pilera

1. Communicate with residents

To build interest among your residents it’s vital to communicate with them. That means, keeping the conversation with them that goes beyond just board meetings and elections. Keep them informed about maintenance, social events, ways you\’re making the community safer and better, and responding to resident queries so you can establish trust.  That way when you’re ready for the next board meeting, you have built interest in the residents.  Pilera’s automated communication enables you to connect with residents how they want: phone, email, text, and now postal mail too.

Sending a community newsletter by email or postal mail is a great way to highlight positive things happening in the community. And, when it comes time for the next board meeting or annual election, communicate the benefits of it to your residents. Pilera\’s communication platform also enables you to create professional marketing messages and newsletters with our rich text editor.

2. Schedule your board meetings in advance

It\’s vital to schedule meetings in advance and notify residents about it, so they can fit it into their busy schedules. In fact, many states even require giving residents advance notice. Pilera’s built-in event calendar feature allows you to create multiple calendars for different event types.  You can then create recurring or one-time events and easily modify them if your schedule changes.  You can also send event notifications on-demand by user type – manager, board member, resident, or other occupants. For example, if you are holding emergency or committee meetings that are board only, you can choose to notify just board members. The event notification also includes a description which is a great way to include more details or important links. For example, you can include a link to join the virtual board meeting.   

3. Value your resident\’s feedback

Showing residents that you take their opinions and concerns seriously is vital to generating homeowner interest in board meetings.  One easy way to do that is to create a pre-meeting and post-meeting survey.  With Pilera’s integration with Formsite, you can customize your form questions and post them in the portal or email a link to residents. Furthermore, you can get results in real-time with tables, charts, PDFs, and Excel reports.

4. Share documents with residents

Many state laws and governing documents require that residents receive a copy of the agenda and/or meeting minutes.  Through Pilera’s online document feature, you can organize files into folders and subfolders, set permissions to improve security, and email documents to residents.

5. Promote self-service within the community

Promoting self-service within the community is a great way to increase homeowner involvement.  That means residents can look up community information at their own time and convenience, without having to call or email management.  The more information you as a board member or manager can add to the portal, the more informed and gradually engaged residents will be.  Through Pilera, you can increase resident engagement by:

• Posting documents and knowledge base articles on a regular basis.  
• Keeping your event calendar updated. 
• Encouraging residents to self-manage their own data such as contact information, addresses, alternate contacts, pets, insurance, and more.  
• Providing them with a convenient, secure way to pay their dues online and review financial balances and ledgers.
• Posting surveys and access to the election ballot when it’s time to vote.  
• Allowing residents to submit work orders, support requests, and architectural change requests and inform them of the status.  

6. Conduct elections online

If your state and governing documents allow it, then consider conducting your community elections online. Online elections give your residents a convenient way to participate from the comfort of their own homes.  You can reach quorum faster and more effectively with online voting because it’s secure, convenient, and fast.  With Pilera’s integration with Formsite, you can customize the ballot, easily send residents a link when it’s time to vote, allow only one vote per unit, and get results in real-time.  Real-time, automated counting of votes saves your community time and eliminates errors.      

Increase HOA Board Meeting Attendance with Pilera

Increasing your HOA board meeting attendance begins with transparent communications and involving residents in the community.  Keeping them updated about what’s happening in the community and giving them more ways to be connected can help you to reach your quorum goals faster.  As you get ready for your annual meetings, consider sending announcements, updating the resident portal, and conducting your elections through Pilera.  To learn more about how Pilera can work for you, contact us at [email protected], book a personalized demo, or drop an email to our support team at [email protected] (if you’re a current client of ours). 

As a community manager or board member creating a budget for the upcoming year, you know that saving money without compromising on operations and resident experience is key. HOA software can save in many areas of a community\’s budget. With the right software, you can reduce administrative costs, hidden expenses, unexpected costs, and even reduce liability. In this month\’s Manager Toolkit article, we discuss 3 areas of operations where Pilera\’s HOA software can save money for your community. Whether you currently use Pilera or are considering HOA software, you\’ll take away key tools you can leverage to streamline operations and save costs in your community\’s budget.

1. Automate Communications

Communicating with residents is an essential part of managing any community. When done well, it improves customer service and overall community operations. Traditional communication methods like postal mail cost approximately $1.11 per unit for every notice you send. This is after you take into account printing, supplies, stamp cost, and employee labor. Over time, mailing notices can cost a community thousands of dollars each year. With Pilera\’s automated communications platform, you can save thousands of dollars for the communities you manage and improve staff efficiency.

How to convince your board to transition to electronic communications with Pilera

Save money with automated communications

Board members and community managers can take advantage of many features in Pilera\’s communications suite to save the community money. These include:

• Email communications – Starting as little as $0.05/unit/month, you can send unlimited emails in Pilera for a fraction of the cost. See the cost breakdown and savings in our latest post for just emails alone.
• Automated phone and text messaging gives you additional means to reach residents in a cost-effective way.
• Our communications platform integrates with other management features in Pilera. That means, you can automatically send email notifications to residents about work orders, documents, ACRs, events, violation notices, payments, and more.

Instantly reach residents during an emergency

During an emergency, every community needs a reliable system that can send out hundreds or thousands of messages quickly. One of the most important benefits of a communication system is the speed at which residents receive a message. Through Pilera, you can send an emergency message through phone or text in a matter of minutes. Our communications platform also has fault protection and retry algorithms built-in. This means that we will retry multiple times to get your message through to residents in an emergency.

Increase the effectiveness of your communications

Giving residents the choice to select their communication and language preference increases your chance of getting a message through effectively. Pilera\’s resident portal allows owners, tenants, and other occupants to choose their communication and language preferences.

Measure your communications efforts with delivery confirmation

When you can measure your communication efforts effectively, you can improve future outreach to your residents. With traditional communication methods such as postal mail or posting notices in a common area, it\’s difficult to predict how many people will see it and whether your message was effective or not. Pilera provides real-time analytics on message delivery, if a resident opened an email, how long they listened to a phone call, or if they replied to your message.

2. Increase Resident Engagement

The more informed residents are, the better a community can function. However, there are many hidden costs that come with the territory of managing a community. Take for instance a phone call with a resident that takes hours to finish, causing other projects to go on the backburner. That\’s where a resident portal comes in.

A resident portal is a central, secure login for residents to access important information about the community and their unit. When residents can log in regularly to get their balance, make a payment, or submit a work order, it gives you more time back in the day.

How to convince your board to implement Pilera\’s resident portal

Reduce hidden expenses and increase productivity

A resident portal is often seen as an upfront cost, but many don\’t consider the administrative expenses that it reduces or removes. When you provide residents with an easy way to access important community and unit information, you can reduce inbound calls and improve staff productivity. You can also reduce mailing costs with a well-maintained resident portal. Save administrative costs through these resident-rich features in Pilera:

• Mobile responsive portal – Residents can view all community and unit information on their own time anywhere and on any device.
• Financial ledgers and balance – Allow your residents to access their financial balance and ledger anytime. Pilera integrates with the popular accounting systems such as QuickBooks Online, Jenark, TOPS, CINC, Caliber, and more.
• Online payments – Residents can pay their HOA dues online in place of mailing in a check. Enabling online payments for the community reduces resident delinquency and the hidden expenses of manually processing checks or making multiple trips to the bank.
• Documents – Share and organize important documents such as CC&R\’s, policy updates, or newsletters with your community. Organize documents through sub-folders; set permissions for board members, owners, tenants, and other occupants; and send email updates to residents.
• Calendars – Keep residents informed of community events and e-notify them.
• Self management of data – Residents can add in alternate addresses and contacts, guests, pets, manage other occupants, and more.
• Resident requests – Residents can submit work orders, architectural change requests, and customer support tickets and add images or files to the ticket. They can receive automated email updates and respond to tickets directly in the portal.
• Community notice – Post a community notice to keep residents informed of time-sensitive information directly in the portal.
• Knowledge Base – Post answers to commonly asked questions to help your residents find what they are looking for.

Empower your residents to save money too

Not just communities, but the residents can individually save money too with Pilera. By sending electronic forms such as surveys to residents, they can submit their responses online and save money on postage. Additionally, residents may need to share documents such as signed leases or pet vaccination records with managers. Through Pilera, residents can upload documents to their unit file so you will see them immediately.

3. Streamline Maintenance

Staying on top of maintenance is critical to keeping residents and employees safe, as well as improving property values. Communities often spend thousands of dollars every year on maintenance. In fact, emergency or unexpected maintenance is one of the biggest challenges managers face.

Choosing the right vendors for the job is another challenge. If a board member knows a contractor who can save the community money, they may hire them, even if they don\’t have an active license or insurance. This can put the community at risk of being held liable if an employee of the uninsured vendor gets injured on the job.

Pilera enables you to save costs throughout the maintenance process. Through robust maintenance management, you can streamline the lifecycle of every request from start to end, improve transparency, and keep your team organized.

How to convince your board to manage maintenance and vendors in Pilera

Conduct preventative maintenance on a regular basis

It\’s important to conduct preventative maintenance on a regular basis to identify risks with common areas or equipment before it escalates to an emergency situation. Proactive preventative maintenance helps an HOA to run smoother by anticipating when repairs need to be made, so there are no unexpected costs. With Pilera\’s work order management, you can create unit and common area work orders. These work orders can then be assigned to a vendor or staff member with a due date and priority.

Organize and prioritize work orders

Organizing work orders is critical to ensuring that staff knows what to work on when and to make sure requests don\’t slip through the cracks. Pilera\’s powerful dashboard provides a quick and easy way to filter through work orders so you can identify the most urgent tickets. You can filter the dashboard by ticket type, assignee, status, category, date ranges, and more to focus on just the information you need. Once you\’ve filtered the dashboard, you can sort work order tickets by priority, age, due date, and more.

Reduce the community\’s liability

Keeping track of vendor information such as license expiration and documentation is essential to saving money for the community. Through Pilera, you can track vendor license expiration dates. An email will automatically be sent to you and the vendor when a license is about to expire or has expired. This feature enables you to significantly reduce liability by knowing which vendors you can send to the community.

Saving on your community budget with Pilera

As you create a budget for next year, consider how you can save money on your communication, resident engagement, and maintenance efforts. Certain expenses such as mailing are more direct. However, other hidden expenses such as opportunity cost, employee time, or liability are just as important to factor in. Pilera\’s HOA software has helped thousands of community managers and board members to streamline their operations and save money. To learn how Pilera can work for your communities today, email us at [email protected] or request a personalized 1:1 demo.

As a property manager, community manager, or maintenance manager, you are tasked with resolving maintenance issues that your residents submit. Successfully organizing your maintenance tickets means that you can set expectations for the day, make sure no tasks fall through the cracks, and ultimately keep your residents happy. On a higher level, you\’re also responsible for reporting progress and delays to your community board members. When successfully being able to present achievements to your community\’s board members, they\’ll be happy with your services. You can retain them for a longer time. In this blog post, we\’ll review 4 ways to use the work order dashboard in Pilera from when you begin your day to when you need to present reports to your stakeholders.

Tip 1: Organize your workday through the work order dashboard

The work order dashboard is a great tool to plan your day and prioritize the tickets you need to work on.  To get started, select the following criteria and click on search:

• State – “Open”
• Status – You can optionally select “new” to drill down further into brand new tickets that haven’t been worked on yet.  
• Assigned to: Yourself
• Start and End Dates: Select the date range to see all tickets created within that range.

Additionally, if you manage multiple communities and want to see all your open tickets, select “All Your Communities” in the Community field.     

After you’ve clicked on “Search”, you can view a list of all the tickets that meet the criteria.  There are multiple ways in which you can sort your tickets to prioritize your work for the day:

• Priority: Sort from the most urgent to least urgent tickets.
• Age: Work on the oldest tickets first and make your way down to the newest tickets.  
• Due: Work on the tickets that have the nearest due date and work your way to ones that are further out.      

Tip #2: Manage staff workload

Successfully being able to manage your staff’s workload on a busy day helps to increase their productivity and prevent employee burnout.  Also, balancing workload effectively among your staff members helps to reduce the response times to residents.  There are a few ways in which you can manage your staff’s maintenance workload in Pilera.

The first way is to filter the dashboard by assignment and community (or all communities) to see how overwhelmed or not your staff members are.

The second way is to run the Ticket Analytics Report which aggregates the number of created, open assigned, and closed work orders (and all other tickets in Pilera) within a certain timeframe.  The report breaks down the data per employee and per community.  Based on the data, you can adjust your staff’s workload so that no one is overwhelmed.  In our Ticket Analytics Report guide, we show you how to create charts to visualize this information.  

Tip #3: No wasted time with the search function

Whether you have a large volume of work orders you manage for your association or you manage several associations at once, there’s no time to waste.  It’s important to access the work order you’re looking for quickly.  Through the dashboard, you can search a work order ticket by a specific word or phrase in the subject.  For example, you can search for “Broken light” or “Pool” and a list of tickets with that word or phrase in the description will appear.  Additionally, you can search for a work order by its ticket ID to quickly locate the ticket.

Tip #4: Impress your clients

Along with resolving maintenance issues your residents submit, management companies must also be able to prove the value of their services to their association clients.  That means showing all of the work you completed in a given timeframe.  Various reports in Pilera make it easy for you to present information to your board or to company executives. 

The first is the Community Meeting Report. Filter the dashboard for criteria you deem important in display in your reports.  As an example, for your monthly meetings, you can filter for all completed work orders in the past month.  Then, select the “Community Meeting Report”.  This report will display a summary of each ticket in a PDF report: unit and location, status, type, expenditures, schedule, and comments.  You can send this report to yourself, another employee, or to a board member. 

The second is the Ticket Analytics Report. This is a handy tool that will give you high-level insights into the work you’re doing for all your communities in one place.  The report shows you how many work orders have been created, open assigned, and have been closed for each community.  Furthermore, this report can help you justify price increases based on the work you’ve done. 

The work order dashboard provides a simple way to slice and dice your community(ies) tickets to fit your needs. Manage your workload for the day and instantly know which tickets are the most urgent or overdue. Always know what work order tickets your staff is working on and dig deeper to see how you can help shift workaround if they are overwhelmed. From managing operations to supporting critical business decisions, using the work order dashboard can increase efficiency and keep your communities happy.