With the number of fully vaccinated individuals increasing, many industries are setting the standard to safely reopen businesses.  For example, the CDC is allowing cruise ships to resume sailing by July 2021 without conducting test cruises as long as 95% of guests have received the vaccine.  New York is the first state to introduce a vaccine passport, a digital app where individuals can securely store electronic copies of their vaccine cards to show as proof before they can be allowed to attend large events such as games.  

HOA’s offer their community members access to many amenities such as gyms, pools, and clubhouses that make association living enjoyable.  Since board members often host events to bring the community together, there is the concern of liability and community safety.  Thus, board members are now asking: Can HOA\’s require residents show proof of COVID-19 vaccination to use amenities or attend events?

Vaccinations are a relatively new topic that HOAs are beginning to have discussions about and there’s no clearly defined answer yet.  Given that, this blog article lists some things to keep in mind about proof of vaccination. We\’ll also discuss how a community can take steps to mitigate risk while starting to reopen.

Regulations

First, it’s important to frequently check your state’s or local regulations on whether businesses can ask for proof of vaccination.  For example, Florida passed a law that prohibits businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from customers to access their services.  Thus, HOA’s that are incorporated and considered a legal entity in the state wouldn’t be able to mandate vaccine proof.  

Consult with your association lawyer

As a board member, you’re likely to be concerned about the community’s liability in the event there is an outbreak.  Thus, it’s best to consult with your lawyer.  Sarah Metcalf, a Business Manager at Pelican Cove Condominium Assn, Inc. in Florida, says that “My understanding is the Law [Florida State] prohibits requiring vaccination proof; however, if the Board ask this question I will tell them that we need legal counsels opinion.”

Could there be any special scenarios in which a community may require proof of vaccination?  Adam Clark, Chief Operating Officer at Excel Association Management in Texas, shares, “I think the communities most likely to implement this kind of requirement would be in 55 and up communities.  All normal precautions (masks, sanitizing items before and after use) should still be observed regardless of vaccinations.  If a community requires proof of vaccination, and it has been given the okay by their attorney, they would likely need to hire some kind of service which would validate vaccination cards prior to letting people into the amenities.”

Understanding resident rights and concerns

Residents may have many concerns about sharing information about their vaccinations with businesses.  Before requiring proof of vaccination in your community, consider the following:

1. Exemptions from vaccinations – Some residents are medically or religiously exempt from getting a vaccine so it’s important that any rules acknowledge these exemptions.   
2. HIPAA Law – HIPAA protects an individual’s right to keep their medical records, including COVID-19 vaccinations private.  As always, be sure to consult with your association lawyer on how to best handle this.
3. Resident’s right to amenities – Resident\’s right to amenities may be listed in the community\’s governing documents. In place of requiring vaccination proof, associations may be able to place restrictions on the use of an amenity. For example, many associations that are reopening their pools such as those managed by Professional Association Services in California, are restricting access only to the unit.

What can you do to ensure safety in reopening the community?

There are other steps you can take to reopen amenities and host events safely if vaccination proof isn\’t an option.

Abide by local, state, and national regulations

Susan Hoffman, the Owner of Professional Association Services in California, says that their associations are reopening pools with the guidance of their local laws.  The pool reopening plans include restricting users to the unit, implementing capacity limits, setting time limits per unit for use, requiring masks out of the pool, and requiring residents to sanitize certain equipment like chairs after use.   
The CDC is also an essential resource for health and safety guidelines.  According to guidance that the CDC released on April 27, 2021, “Fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear a mask outdoors, except in certain crowded settings and venues.”   

Survey your residents and then hold board meeting(s) to develop a plan for safe reopening

Survey your residents to understand how they feel about reopening amenities and being part of community events.  Are there certain amenities they want open more than others?  Would they rather have online virtual events with no limit on the number of people that attend? Or would they prefer in-person events with a limited number of people and social distancing?  Can you develop a phased approach to reopening amenities and hosting events to make it safe and comfortable for everyone? Once you have gained feedback, host a board meeting to develop a plan.

Continue to implement health and safety guidelines

Regardless of whether you can require vaccination proof or not, it’s important to continue practicing local health and safety guidelines.  For example, Massachusetts has released guidance on the safe reopening of pools.  Their guidelines include social distancing, face coverings in indoor pools (with medical exemptions), limited capacity in changing areas, spacing out pool furniture, sanitization, ventilation requirements, and other rules to adhere to. 

Communicate with your residents

Once your community has developed a safety plan, be sure to communicate it with your residents.  Use a mix of traditional methods such as direct mail and digital methods such as your website, email, and text.  That way, you can reach your residents at the right place and time.   Pilera community management platform empowers board members and managers to keep residents informed in multiple ways.  Pilera’s automated communication product enables you to send email, text, and phone messages to your residents. You can segment your communication by location or user type. Complement your electronic communications with Pilera\’s HOA website that is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Post documents and other useful information on your website that residents can access with a secure login.

Can HOA\’s require residents to show proof of vaccination to use amenities or attend events? To get the most accurate guidance for your community, be sure to refer to the laws and consult with your association lawyer.  Continue implementing health and safety guidelines set by your county.  For every decision made, communicate it with your residents so you can deliver a safe and enjoyable environment this summer.  

Disclaimer: This article does not contain any legal advice. Be sure to consult with your association lawyer before developing any policy.

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!

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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.

Pilera’s built-in event calendar helps you manage community events and email notifications all in one simple user interface.  As a new feature makes its way to the community calendar, we thought of compiling top tips to make managing your events easier! 

Create custom calendars

If your community hosts a variety of events, you can organize them in Pilera using the Custom Calendars feature.  Does your community have monthly board meetings? Do you often need to notify residents when maintenance activities are taking place? Does your community host fun virtual events such as a trivia night? Consider creating separate calendars for board meeting events, maintenance activities, community events, and clubhouse availability. Managers, board members, and residents can drill down to the specific calendar they want to view upcoming events for in the portal or website.  Each calendar is color-coded for easy readability.  

Set up recurring events – NEW!

Most communities will have an event that they need to schedule on a regular basis. Managers can now create Recurring Events, a new feature in Pilera, to easily add, update, and delete these ongoing events.  Managers can set up recurring events to occur on a yearly, monthly, weekly, or daily basis.  For weekly events, managers can specify the days in which the event occurs or if it occurs every other day.  From regular board meetings to weekly trash pickup or monthly virtual hangouts, just create a recurring event to automate the process! 

Send on-demand email notifications

Once you’ve set up your event in Pilera, you can send email notifications on-demand to your community.  That means you can send an email notification for the event when you want to. For example, if you want to send a notification a week or a day before the event, you can simply click on the event in the calendar and send a notification. Additionally, Pilera’s advanced segmentation options give you the ability to send event invites only to certain locations in your community or to certain user types.  For example, if Building 1 conducts monthly alarm tests, you can notify residents that live only in that building.   

Know your event invite was sent with confidence

Pilera tracks every communication that managers send out to a community in the Message Center.  Once you have sent out your event email invite, you can view a list of residents that the message has been sent to along with the delivery status.  Easily check whether a resident opened the email, responded to it, or if the email bounced.

Include virtual event links in the description

When you create an event in Pilera, it\’s important to add a description that lets your board members and residents know what the event is about.  If you are hosting virtual events through Meeting Software, add the registration link to the description through Pilera’s events module.  The robustness of Pilera\’s email notification system provides greater capabilities to notify your community than an email client would. That means if you want to send a virtual trivia night registration link to owners only, you can select that user type instead of sending it to the entire community. It is also easier for board members and residents to access the registration link in the portal.

Display your event calendar on the community website

Keeping your community engaged and informed leads to increased resident satisfaction.  One way to do this is by keeping your community website content fresh.  Many of Pilera’s features, like the event calendar, integrates with the community website.  This means that once you have added the event calendar module to a web page, all events you create in the portal will automatically be displayed on the website. Our clients love this feature because it saves them time, eliminating the need to update the calendar in two places.

Pilera\’s intuitive, built-in calendar keeps your community informed and your events organized, all the while saving your staff time. Custom calendars enable your community to dive into the type of events they\’re interested in, while the new recurring events feature is aimed to save time scheduling ongoing events. If you\’d like to learn more about the community calendar features, contact us at [email protected].

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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. May we help your community achieve these success stories? Contact us to see how Pilera’s community management suite can help your company.

Greetings everyone!  Many of our customers requested an easier way to schedule events they hold on a frequent basis, and we’re excited to share that we finally have recurring events! If you’ve been looking to automate your board member meetings or your community activities, now you can! 

New Recurring Events

Set a recurring schedule

As you create your event, you can schedule how often that event occurs on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. For weekly events, you can select the days to schedule the event for. Additionally, you can decide whether to set an end date for the event or let it run forever.

Consider these examples:

• Monthly board meetings and yearly budget meetings.
• Community activities such as biweekly virtual trivia night or a talent show every six months.
• Maintenance activities such as weekly trash pickup, monthly alarm testing, and more.

Modifying recurring events made easy

Chances are, you’ll need to modify a recurring event. Maybe you need to edit the title name or add more details in the description.  In Pilera, it’s easy to modify an event.  You can either choose to split just this event and update it or you can update this and all future events in one go.  

View all recurring events in the calendar

The calendar will display a list of all the one-time events and recurring events that you have created. By selecting specific custom calendars you\’ve created, you can get a more granular view of the events that are happening. Additionally, you can view the calendar by month, week, or day.

Notify your community about the event

Through the community calendar, you can send email notifications about events on-demand, any time.  You can further refine who receives your message by selecting a location (street, building, floor, or unit) or user type (owners, tenants, others, managers).   

Watch Video: New Feature Overview – Recurring Events & Communication Distribution Groups

Automate your events today with new recurring events

With Pilera’s new recurring events feature, you’ll save more time managing your community’s events.  It’s now easier than ever to schedule events you host on a regular basis like a board meeting or a resident event and modify the events if you need to.  

Greetings,

We’re back with a half-year roundup post of the new features and major enhancements we released in Pilera’s community management software.  In this blog post, you\’ll learn about new updates in Pilera from January to June of this year and how you can start leveraging some of our new functionality for your communities.  

1) Communication Updates

This year we’ve made two major updates to our communication platform to give our clients a more efficient and cost-effective experience as they communicate with their communities. The first is the Portfolio Announcement feature. Through this feature, managers can send out email announcements to select communities or to their entire portfolio. Additionally, they can further segment their messages by the type of user: owners, tenants, board members, and other occupants. Especially during these uncertain times, many of our managers prefer to send company-wide updates to their staff members, company policy updates to their board members, or reach a wide range of residents at once. With the Portfolio Announcement feature, communicating with many communities at once has become simpler and faster than ever. If you’d like to sign up for a free trial of the Portfolio Communication feature, please contact [email protected].

The second is the Communication+ product, which enables managers to send out unlimited text and phone messages to their communities at a more affordable price of $2/unit/year.  It is now easier for Company Admins to purchase the product within the Communication screen in Pilera.  Read more about the benefits of Communication+ here.

2) Resident Dashboard

As residents log into their community portal, they are welcomed with a new, more intuitive home screen called the Resident Dashboard.

In the new dashboard, residents have quick and easy access to their communication preferences, payment balance, open work orders, ARC requests, waiting packages, communications sent to them in the past month, and management office hours.

3) Board Member Dashboard

Similar to residents, board members also have access to their new board dashboard as they log into the Pilera portal to give them high-level insight into their account and what is going on in the community they lead.  Board members have an additional set of information available to them in the dashboard: open tasks and ARCs in the community.

4) Custom Event Calendars

An important way that managers and board members build a sense of community is by hosting a variety of events.  To enable our clients to better manage various events, we’ve released a new Custom Event Calendar feature.  Through this feature, managers can create custom calendars, add events to those calendars, and manage notifications.  Some examples of custom calendars that managers can create include kid’s events, amenity open hours, amenity closures for maintenance, and more.  As many in-person events have shifted digitally during the ongoing pandemic, managers can send a link to the online event invite within the email notification in Pilera and track opens in the message center. 

The Custom Calendar, which is part of the Board+ functionality, also provides many features for board members and community managers to work on community responsibilities together.  If you’d like to learn more about how Custom Event Calendars and the Board+ product can work for you, please contact us at [email protected].  

5) Insurance Dashboard

The insurance dashboard provides a summary of all insurance tickets managers have created in a specific community or across their entire portfolio.  The main aim of this dashboard is to provide managers with high-level insights on types of insurance being tracked, expiration information, and quick access to insurance agent information.  Managers can also generate reports for their offline use by filtering criteria that meets their business needs.

Other Notable Mentions

• Due to a drastic increase in use over the past 4 months, we have optimized our system to increase message deliverability speed by up to 20x during high traffic times.  
• When sending a notification about an event in the new Event Calendar, managers can choose to notify by location (entire community or specific street, building, floor, or unit) or type of user (owner, tenant, other occupants, and/or a manager).
• Residents will have an improved user experience while viewing and editing work orders.  In the portal, residents can now sort and filter common area work orders by the state: any, open, and closed.  Additionally, we’ve improved the editing experience for the resident’s unit-level work orders.
• We have streamlined the folder creation process in the document library.  Now, when creating a folder, you can adjust the permissions, sort order, and description immediately in the same user interface.  This new enhancement will help managers save time in managing folders in the document library.
• Managers can now search for ticket ID’s in the dashboard via the Subject field.

Missed any of our previous feature updates?  Check them all out below!

• June 2020 – Portfolio announcement, board member fixes, and resident work order enhancement.
• April 2020 – Custom event calendar and ticket analytics enhancement.
• March 2020 – Getting Communication+ directly from the app, document library enhancement, and better clarification for the resident opt-out.
• February 2020 – Insurance Dashboard, ticket ID, and event calendar notification updates.
• January 2020 – Resident & Board dashboard, event calendar in websites, and knowledge base enhancements.

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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.

Greetings!  We\’re back with new features and updates to our community management platform for the month of April.  This month, we\’re introducing a new custom calendars feature.

New Feature

Custom Calendars

We’ve enhanced our event calendar feature to include the creation of custom calendars.  Managers can now create multiple calendars to effectively cater to the needs of their communities.  Simply navigate to Calendar Management under the Settings tab to get started with creating your calendars.  Then, in the event calendar under the Community tab, managers can have an aggregated view of events from all calendars on one screen or they can toggle to select which calendar is displayed.  Calendars are currently available to all residents. 

Watch Video: Community Calendar Training

Here are a few suggestions of custom calendars that you can create:

• Community Events
• Community Clubhouse
• Tennis Calendar
• Kids Events
• Board Meetings
• Maintenance Events

Enhancements:

Multiple ways to access the Ticket Analytics Report

The Task Management and Architecture Change Request pages now contain a link to generate a Ticket Analytics Report.  The Ticket Analytics Report released earlier this year aggregates all created, closed, and open assigned tickets at a community or portfolio level.  To learn more about how the New Ticket Analytics can help your management company to enhance acquisition and retention objectives, take a look at our new Analytics Guide.

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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.

Greetings,

We have two new exciting updates as we\’ve entered in the new year and decade.  These two new features are designed to enhance the resident experience in their community portal.  Read on to learn more about these updates and some enhancements and fixes to Pilera\’s community management platform this month.

New Features

Resident Dashboard

The resident dashboard provides residents and board members with a current snapshot of what is occurring in the community as well as with their unit in one place.  Each time the resident or board member logs into the portal, they will be greeted by the resident dashboard.

Information residents will see include:

• Contact information such as phone number for calls and text messages, and their email address. If their contact information is not listed in the portal, they can choose to add it easily. This section shows an indicator of which contact method is preferred versus which is not. Residents will also be alerted in the app if their email or text number is invalid.
• A quick link to the resident’s profile.
• The current open balance, a link to make a payment, and a link to view the balance and ledger.
• The number of open work orders.
• The number of common area work orders.
• The number of new messages in the past month.
• The number of packages waiting to be picked up.
• The number of open architecture change requests in the past month.
• Office Hours – View today’s office hours, a link to view all office hours, and a link to contact management.

Board members also gain access to additional information in their dashboard:

• The number of open tasks in the community.
• The number of open architecture change requests in the community.
  

Event Calendar in Easysites Community Website

Managers can add the new event calendar directly into the Easysite, Pilera’s community website platform.  Furthermore, they can manage all event details such as editing the event or sending notifications from the website and it will be synced back to the portal.  Residents visiting the community website can log in and view the events.   

Enhancements

1. In the December 2019 update, we released the Ticket Analytics Report.  In this month’s release, we have made some improvements to the speed. Reports that previously took a few hours to be built are now done in a few seconds.
2. Managers can now enter in one or many custom email addresses to the Master Report and Ticket Analytics Report to send the report to individuals as opposed
   to just the predetermined group of users.

   

3. We’ve improved the speed of receiving emails when creating or updating tickets.
4. Previously, managers needed to add a comment when reassigning a ticket to another manager.  Now, they can reassign the ticket without adding a comment. Additionally, the new assignee will receive an email notification on their new ticket and the previous assignee will receive an email notification informing them they are no longer assigned to the ticket.
5. The start and end date now include not just tickets created in that date range, but also those last modified in the date range, closed in the date range, or scheduled (targeted) t to be completed on that date range.
6. The knowledgebase articles have now been set to alphabetize before the user conducts a search.

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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. 

Greetings everyone,

We\’re back this month with a load of updates, including two new features!  Architecture Change Request is a new functionality in this release, which has been highly requested by our clients and will be join our HOA+ product.  We\’ve also developed a new calendar system within Pilera, so you don\’t have to embed calendars from other service providers.  Without further ado, let\’s dive into these new updates!

New Features

Architecture Change Requests

This new feature, built for HOA+, enables managers to process architecture change requests more efficiently and increase resident happiness. Here’s what our new architecture change request module can do:

• Residents can submit architecture change requests in the resident portal, receive notifications of the status, and comment on a request if managers enable it.
  
• Managers can assign tickets to themselves, other managers, and board members (the latter feature is releasing in December 2019).
• Set due dates for each request.
• Update the status of an ACR: approve, in progress, on hold, reject, and more.
  
• Filter on various criteria through a powerful dashboard.
• Generate an Excel summary report to show during board meetings.

Learn more about how new Architecture Change Requests can benefit your communities today.

Built-in Events Calendar

We’ve developed a new Built-In Events Calendar feature in the resident portal.  The events calendar is more intuitive and allows managers to handle event creation all in one place.  Managers can also send email notifications to the community on-demand and view the status in the Message Center.  As a note, the legacy calendar functionality will be depreciated on 1/1/2021 so please prepare to transition any upcoming events to the new calendar.

Learn more how our new built-in events calendar can create efficiencies in your event creation and notification processes.

Enhancements:

1. TOPS Alternate Addresses – The alternate addresses from TOPS will now display in Pilera.
2. In the insurance record, we’ve added the “Expiration Date” field so that managers no longer have to edit the ticket to view the expiration date.
3. Work order settings emails were receiving all ticket emails, therefore, we’ve renamed the Work Order Ticket Settings page to “Ticket Settings” to improve clarity.
4. In the Pilera Resources form, we’ve changed the name of one form to “Remove a Community” for improved clarity.
5. We’ve improved the styling of the transition page from Pilera’s portal to the payment site to provide residents with a better experience.

Free Resource: Watch Board+ Webinar on Demand

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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. 

As you gear up for year-end meetings and community celebrations, you’re keeping busy with the event details and ensuring that residents are notified in a timely manner.  This month, we’re excited to share that managing your calendar of events and informing residents has become easier than ever! Releasing on November 12th, Pilera’s newly revamped event calendar, part of the Resident Portal product, is easier to use, more intuitive to work with, and gives you more flexibility in notifying the community. 

Watch Video: Event Calendar Training

Streamline your community events with Pilera

One central place to manage all events

Pilera’s events calendar is built into the system, which means that you now have one central place to manage all events.  No worries about managing events through external calendar services and then embedding the calendar into Pilera.  You can now add event details and time range with ease, all in one place.  

Create custom event calendars

As of Pilera\’s April 2020 release, managers can create custom event calendars to manage the different types of events they hold in their community.  Managers can create custom calendars for community events, board meetings, tennis courts, clubhouses, kid\’s events, and more.  Residents can view all the events or select a specific calendar to view upcoming events.

On-demand email notifications

In the legacy event calendar, managers could send a one-time notification of events upon the creation of the event.  Now, we’ve built an on-demand notification system so that managers can send emails to residents about an event when they need it, and not just upon event creation.  

Know that residents received the event invite

Knowing that residents are adequately informed of community events is imperative to the success of that event and bringing the community together.  Managers can now track all event-related email notifications in the message center, so they know who has received the message.  

More intuitive view of events

Residents can now have a more intuitive view of all events to stay connected to the community.  Through the calendar, residents can toggle between multiple ways to view events: monthly, weekly, or daily.    

How can I start using the Event Calendar?

If you\’d like this new feature enabled for your communities, please contact [email protected].

*The Pilera Software team updated this blog article to reflect new updates to the community events calendar feature.

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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. 

The best way to create a community in your condo association is to make the residents feel like a community. There are myriad ways to do this, but one of the best is to plan a fun and inclusive social event that everyone can enjoy.

Most of the typical social events revolve around something specific on the calendar – community trick-or-treating around Halloween, a holiday party, or a Super Bowl get-together. But there are plenty of events that can happen anytime, and that can fill in the gaps when there’s nothing else happening that time of year.

For example, there are lots of folks who enjoy cooking. How about hosting a chili cook-off? Those who are experts will surely jump at the chance, and novices can discover culinary skills that they never knew they possessed.

Another fun event is a carnival. It might sound like something that could break the community bank, but there are many carnival attractions that can be had for little or no money. Renting a bouncy house doesn’t cost that much, and you might already have someone in the community who is a talented face painter.

There are also pool parties. If your community already has a pool, this one’s a breeze. Just set up some music and get a grill to cook out, maybe a few decorations and you should be ready to go.

Once you start thinking outside the box, there are plenty of events you can plan to build up your community. And when people are getting together, meeting one another and having a good time, life is better for everyone!

Pilera is a best-of-class, easy-to-use, comprehensive online property management solution for apartments, condos, and associations. Pilera provides the easiest, most comprehensive data management capability available to property managers, leasing agents, boards of directors, and back-office personnel. Quickly and easily access whatever you need, whenever you need it, from wherever you need to be with office or mobile phone connectivity. You are never out of touch. Act on the document/information accessed from the office or “on-the-road” with Pilera-supported mobile capability. Contact us today!