work orders

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.
Work orders

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.      
Manage and prioritize work orders

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.

Work order dashboard

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.  

Workload distribution

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.

Search tickets function in Pilera

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. 

Work order report

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. 

See how much work each community is generating.

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.

Community association and property management companies have seen much evolution in the past several years.  Residents and board members want more transparency in how their community is being managed.  Management companies are placing customer support at the heart of their operations. Thus, they\’re viewing technology as a way to offer the best possible service to their clients.  As a technology provider, Pilera has continued to innovate to empower property managers and community managers in growing their business, increasing work efficiency, and satisfying their clientele.  

In 2009, Pilera entered the property management industry by addressing a specific need for managers to communicate with their residents.  A little over a decade later, we’ve built one of the most reliable communications platforms in the industry.  We’ve also expanded our software platform to manage various aspects of property management – customer service, maintenance, resident engagement, and website management.  In this blog article, we highlight some of the biggest updates we\’ve made to our platform each year.

Check out the entire Pilera timeline here! If you\’re short on time, continue on our blog post right here!

2015: Pilera becomes an industry leader in Communications!

2015 was a turning point for Pilera’s communications suite as we released a vast number of features.  In addition to making automated phone calls and sending emails, managers could also start sending out text messages.  Messages can also be sent out in the resident’s preferred language.  Additionally, Pilera released a new built-in message delivery fault protection system which means that we make several attempts to send messages even when the service network is down or there is an emergency.

Other notable releases in 2015:

  • Add your company brand to emails so residents instantly recognize your company.
  • Receive automated ticket notifications for common area work orders and activity logs.
  • A number of accounting integration updates for VMS, C3, Jenark, TOPS, and Caliber.

2016: Manage your community’s work with a redesigned ticketing system

Pilera redesigned the ticketing system that provides more advanced tracking capabilities for work orders, rule violations, and activity logs.   

Another exciting feature we released is the knowledge base, a powerful FAQ center for your residents to get answers to important community questions. It\’s a great tool for your staff as well. When staff members are working after-hours or you hire a new employee, they can refer to the knowledge base during a resident call.

Other notable releases in 2016:

  • When residents call in, you can troubleshoot their questions or issues on the spot with the pretender functionality.  
  • Residents can manage other occupants in their unit.
  • Send documents to an entire community. 
  • Get insights on workload with automated work order reports.    
  • Several integration updates for TOPS and C3. 

2017: Increase work efficiency even when managing multiple communities or properties

It\’s easier than ever to see all tickets for a community you manage in a single dashboard.  Select criteria such as status, who the ticket is assigned to, and date range to get a detailed view of your work.    

Other notable releases in 2017:

  • Access common area and unit-level work orders in a single dashboard.
  • Download a PDF copy of work order tickets from your search results.
  • We’ve increased the speed of sending out text messages by a rate of 15x!
  • Track all vendor information, add license expirations, staff, and more through the new vendor app. Then, assign vendors to work order tickets.
  • Manage user permissions for company and community roles with the new User Roles Administration feature.

2018: Mobile-responsive websites, new document library & several more great features!

Pilera HOA websites get a brand new look and feel!  Choose from a variety of easy-to-use mobile-responsive website layouts so that you can make it easy for residents to learn more about their community.

Another exciting new feature is the revamped document library, which comes with more powerful permissions and folder structure than the previous version.  

Other notable releases in 2018:

  • Pet tracking and search.
  • Search for residents across your entire portfolio.
  • See all the residents who have or haven\’t received a welcome message in the new welcome message dashboard.
  • Opt-in community directory keeps your residents connected.
  • Download a Community PDF report of the work orders that you can present at a company or board meeting.
  • The Caliber integration now provides multi-transaction support and CalPay.

2019: Pilera goes mobile!

Pilera goes mobile!  A new mobile-friendly version of the manager and resident portals empowers managers to work on all their tasks whether they are at the office, home, or on-site.  Residents can also view all their community information anywhere on any device. 

Other notable releases in 2019:

  • Board members and managers can create, assign, and track tasks.
  • Keep track of all architectural change requests, as well as accept or reject them. Residents can also submit ACRs and view the status.
  • Manage your community\’s events directly in Pilera through our built-in calendar.
  • Numerous ticket improvements – New Ticket Analytics Report, Custom Ticket Categories, and the ability to associate tickets with the account.
  • Residents can log into multiple units they own within the same session.
  • New Vantaca integration.  

2020: New dashboards.  Plus, send an email to your entire portfolio!

Now, when managers, board members, and residents log into Pilera, they are greeted with a new dashboard that gives them a high-level summary of what is happening in the community. Managers will see an aggregate total of all their open and assigned work orders, architectural change requests, tasks, and violations.  Residents will see their payment balance as well as an aggregate of their work orders, architectural change requests, and communications.  Board members get additional insight into the tasks and ACRs that are assigned to them.  

Another new update is the ability to send email messages across your entire portfolio? Need to send a message to residents or board members in all your communities?  Now you can!

Other notable releases in 2020:

  • Search for and keep track of guest information in the new visitor management feature.
  • New Asyst integration.
  • TOPS One integration is now two-way.

2021: Powerful communication enhancements, recurring events & more!

The first release of the year was a popularly requested feature by our clients, distribution groups.  Through Pilera’s distribution groups, you can create any combination of users and locations to send messages to.  Easily add residents from a specific street, building, floor, or unit to the group.  The groups also self-maintain themselves whenever a resident enters or leaves a unit, so that you don’t have to.

Another major improvement to the communications platform just this week is the ability to add attachments and images to emails.  This means that you can create more professional and beautiful marketing emails to send to your communities. 

Another popular request is the ability to create recurring events.  You can now set up recurring event schedules for ongoing meetings you host.  Then, keep your residents informed by sending them an email notification at any time. 

Other notable releases in 2021 so far:

  • Organize your tickets by priority, age, and due date.
  • Import and export your document library. 
  • Authorize.net online payment integration.
  • There’s a lot more coming your way! 

Take your company to the next level with Pilera

Keeping your community informed, increasing efficiency for your staff, and growing your company are some of the goals that Pilera can help you achieve.  When you partner with Pilera for your management company, you’ll always lead with the latest technological innovations and proactive customer support by your side.  To learn more about how Pilera can work for your communities, you can book a personalized 1:1 demo.

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

Top New Features

1) Dynamic location and people-based distribution groups

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

Watch the Distribution Groups video here!

Feature Highlights:

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

Released On: January 6, 2021
Product: Communications

2) Recurring Events

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

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

Feature Highlights:

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

Released On: February 4, 2021
Product: Resident Portal

3) Ticket priority by age and urgency

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

Feature Highlights:

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

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

4) Document library import and export

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

Released On: March 30, 2021
Product: Resident Portal

5) Activity Log in the Manager Dashboard

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

Released On: March 30, 2021
Product: Help Desk

6) Better customizability for reports

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

Released On: March 2, 2021

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

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

Released On: March 30, 2021
Product: Resident Portal

8) View occupant notes in reports

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

Released On: March 2, 2021

Feature Enhancements

Communications

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

Maintenance

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

Board+

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

Ticketing System

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

Community Websites

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

Company Websites

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

Integration Updates

QuickBooks Online

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

TOPS

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

Stay tuned for more updates!

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


About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management suite that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations. May we help your community achieve these success storiesContact us to see how Pilera’s community management suite can help your company.

Greetings everyone, this month we’re excited to announce many new features and enhancements that will enable managers to better streamline tasks, simplify reporting, and improve the resident experience. 

New Features

1) Customizing your reports is easier than ever

We’ve improved report tables in the Resident Report, Vehicles Report, Address Report, and Alternate Contacts Report for easier browsing, exporting and customizing.  The report tables are also mobile-friendly, so you can browse information on the go.  Additionally, if you’d like to take the information offline, you can export it to an Excel file or copy the table contents.

2) Occupant Notes are now available in reports

We’ve now added the option to include the Occupant Notes in the Resident Report so you can get important information about the resident record quickly.  Additionally, you can choose to export the Occupant Notes along with other data to an Excel file. 

3) Add TOPS Resident Ledger to your Community Websites

For our clients that use the TOPS accounting integration, you can now add the TOPS ledger module to the community websites.  When residents log into the website, they will be able to view their balance and ledger. 

Enhancements

1) New & improved way to prioritize your tickets

The ticket tables include some modifications that we’ve made that will make it easier for managers and staff to prioritize tickets by urgency and age.  These new columns are now available in all ticket types including work orders, task management, architectural change requests, activity logs, and rule violations.  Managers can sort by:

  • Priority – Each priority is now color-coded so you will instantly know which tickets are the most urgent.  
  • Age – The “Age” column replaces the “Created Date”.  Managers can now see how long it has been since the ticket was created.  Mousing over the age will show when you created the ticket.   
  • Due – Quickly see how many days are left until the ticket is due for completion or how many days it is overdue.  Mousing over the number will display the actual due date.    

2) Improved navigation for your Community Websites

We’ve improved the usability of the Easysite community websites when creating and organizing the navigation.  We’ve also enhanced the page permissions for pages and sub-pages.

3) Request a new Enterprise Website in the app

If you’d like an enterprise website for your HOA management or property management business, you can now request one directly from the Pilera app in the “Pilera Resources” section.  Gaining a competitive advantage and growing your business is easy with Pilera’s enterprise website features such as drag & drop content, lead generation forms, SEO, and more.    

Company Website

4) Assign board members to ACRs quickly

Managers can now assign board members to architectural change requests when creating the ticket.

5) Sort by the community in the Task Management dashboard

When you select “All Communities” in the task management dashboard, the ticket table will now show the community.  This means that managers can now sort tasks by the community. 

6) Improved readability for ticket comments

We’ve improved the readability experience for longer comments in tickets.  Take note of some great ways to use the ticket comments to convey more intricate information:

  • Instructions for a work order job.
  • A detailed update on how you resolved a challenging customer support ticket.
  • Update other board members of detailed discussions with potential vendors while soliciting bids.

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

Greetings! This month we\’re back with updates on our new accounting integration with Asyst as well as a new work order enhancement that will improve internal productivity and communication with your residents! Without further ado, let\’s talk about these new updates!

New Feature

Asyst Integration

Pilera is excited to announce our new integration with Asyst’s accounting platform.  Asyst is a property management software serving HOA’s and condo’s with a specialization in accounting, property management, and collection services.  Take a look at how Pilera enhances the integration experience with Asyst:

  • Owner, tenant, and other user types; contact information; and address will be synced from Asyst to Pilera.  As a result, managers can track important resident information and send phone, email, and text messages in one click.
  • Managers can track all of their community responsibilities in one place so they can stay organized and improve productivity.  Track, collaborate, and report on work orders, activity/incident logs, architectural change requests, violations, and tasks in one place.
  • Residents can get connected to their community quickly through Pilera\’s premier portal.  They can then access important documents, events, communications, resident directory, and more!  

If you would like to learn more about our integration with Asyst, please contact [email protected].

Enhancements

Customize Work Order Alerts

Managers can now customize alerts in the work order ticket to notify residents of important information or specific rules to follow when they submit a work order. This new feature enables management to reduce inbound phone calls and emails to the office by alerting residents of critical information.   With some HTML code, managers can customize the look and feel of the message. 

To save time and keep messaging consistent across the company, managers can apply this alert to multiple communities at once.  This message will display for both managers and residents when they submit a common area or unit-level work order ticket.  

Take a look at some examples of how you can use the new custom text to convey important information to residents:

  1. Inform residents to call a specific number if there is a maintenance emergency instead of submitting a ticket.  
  2. Inform residents about the process for submitting a work order and set expectations for when they may receive a response.  
  3. Answer a commonly asked question right on the work order submission area. 
  4. HOA communities – Let residents know where they can access the community’s maintenance responsibility matrix/chart.

TIP: Work order alert templates in the ticket can also be used in conjunction with the work order message templates to relay important information to your residents and reduce inbound phone calls/emails.  In the February 2019 release, we’ve added the ability for managers to add important information as a header in the work order email notification to residents. 


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

Work Order Reporting to Make Informed Decisions

Note: This blog article was updated in 2023 to reflect the latest Pilera work order features.

As a community or property manager, your role encompasses a wide range of responsibilities, including effectively managing maintenance. However, community management teams are often overwhelmed with lost work orders and staff burnout. To help your team stay organized, boost efficiency, and improve client satisfaction, we\’ve compiled a list of reports in Pilera that your team can utilize.

The brand new Ticket Charts feature in Pilera gives you visual insights into work orders and other ticket types in your community or across your entire portfolio. In the work order charts, you can get insights on:

  • The trend of open versus closed tickets over time.
  • A breakdown of work orders by priority.
  • A breakdown of work orders by category, so you know which type of issues are most common.
  • The percentage of work orders that are open, closed, or have been deleted.
  • Work orders by status – any, new, acknowledged, in progress, in review, on hold, completed, canceled, rejected, or deleted.
  • A breakdown of work orders assigned to managers, board members, or vendors.
Work order charts in Pilera

Community Meeting Report

The Community Meeting Report is a valuable tool to showcase your team\’s efforts to both executive members and board members. This comprehensive report consolidates all relevant tickets from the work order dashboard, based on your specified search criteria, into a concise and easily accessible PDF document.

To get started with this report, select your criteria for this report: community, work order type, status, assignment, category, start date, target date, etc. Then, click on the Community Meeting Report link and choose to view resident or manager comments, or both. Once you’ve added your email address, you can have this report sent straight to your inbox. Take a look!

A sample of the Community Meeting report with the manager and resident comments.

Stale Work Order Reports

The stale work order report is a weekly automated report in a Microsoft Excel format that Pilera sends to help you take action on the most pressing maintenance items.  Be sure to check your inbox every Monday for this report!  This report has 3 tabs: a full list of work orders created that week, work orders that haven\’t been triaged (or assigned) in the past 2 days, and a list of all work orders that haven\’t been touched in 30 days.

Sample of the stale work order report.
Sample of the stale work order report. This specific report displays the work orders that are yet to be assigned to a manager or a vendor.

Get more granular analysis across all your work

The Ticket Analytics Report is a great report to get insights into all of the work your team is doing – work orders, architectural change requests, violations, support tasks, request for proposals, and board tasks. The report aggregates the total number of created, open assigned, and closed work orders per employee and per association or apartment building.  To find the ticket analytics report, simply navigate to Work Orders under the Ticket tab, and click on this reporting option on the right-hand side.  You can then select a date range to generate the report and who you’d like to send it to. 

Now that you’ve generated the report, why don’t you try out a few of these use cases for your business?  

  • Create a pie chart that displays the workload distribution among your staff members for the maintenance tickets created, closed, and open assigned.
  • Create a bar graph displaying how much work each building or community creates for your company. Is Community “A” creating a significantly higher volume of work order requests compared to Community “B”, “C”, and “D”? You may decide to increase their management fees.
  • Take a look at the created and closed work orders. Identify any patterns, such as whether maintenance staff is closing out fewer work orders than creating. Then refer to the charts you’ve created above and identify where you can distribute the workload for better performance and efficiency.  Based on your findings, you\’ll be able to make decisions to assist staff members who may need additional training or an additional hand; or give kudos to your staff members who are meeting or exceeding their goals.
Sample of an employee ticket distribution pie chart that you can create based on the analytics report you generate.

Bonus Tip: With a basic understanding of pivot tables and charts via Excel, you can present all your work order and other efforts to your stakeholders in a visual format. Download our Ticket Analytics Guide to get started. 

Conclusion

As maintenance is a dynamic function of property and community management with many moving parts, having comprehensive reports with the flexibility to generate the information you need is important.  As you continue to manage work orders in Pilera, these reports will help you make more informed tactical and high-level business decisions.  If you’d like to learn more about the reports or have any questions, please contact [email protected] and we’d be happy to help you! 


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

Are you wanting to strengthen your competitive position in the property management market or improve staffing decisions internally?  Well, now in Pilera, management executives will be able to do all this and more with our new Ticket Analytics Reports! Insights from these reports can facilitate decisions on daily operations, customer retention, and new customer acquisition efforts.  The Ticket Analytics Report combines created, closed, and open metrics for all ticket types into one report.

Where you can find the new report:

Navigate to the Work Orders or Activity Logs page in the app and click on “Analytics Report”.  You can further slice and dice this report by selecting a specific community or all communities, date range, and time range up to the minute.  

How the new report can help maximize efficiency in your operations:

1) Gain business insights on a community or portfolio level

The Ticket Analytics Report helps gain valuable business insights on a per community basis or across the entire portfolio of communities. Company Admins (referred to as executives in our post) can generate reports cross-community, and Community Managers (referred to as managers) can generate reports in the communities they are responsible for operating. When the company executive selects “All Communities”, they will be able to see a breakdown of every community and all the created, closed, and open tickets for:

  • Work Orders
  • Activity Logs
  • Tasks
  • Architecture Change Requests
  • Rule Violations
  • Insurance

2) Determine the profitability of a client

For each community, executives will be able to see the number of created, closed, and open tickets.  These metrics are an important indicator of the amount of work your company is performing for the community.  If a community is generating too much work and the costs outweigh the profits, the company may decide not to work with that community.  Company executives can then determine how much to charge back to the community for services rendered or how much to increase the going rate for annual fees based on manager output.  

3) Successfully compete in the property management marketplace

An important goal of management companies is to increase their competitive position in the property management market.  Management companies compete through service offerings and pricing. Business insights from reports are a powerful way for the management company to bring added value to prospects. Their ability to provide these business insights can serve as an important selling factor for the community.  Company executives can also adjust their bid price for the new community by using the work they handle for current clients as a base.

4) Improve staffing decisions

An optimal level of staffing is critical to running daily operations and providing clients with the customer support they expect to receive.  In the Ticket Analytics Report, company executives can view a list of all employees and the tickets they’ve created, closed, or are still open and assigned to them broken down by the type of ticket. These metrics will assist executives in making better-informed decisions to fulfill their staffing needs.  Created tickets versus closed versus open in a time frame will inform executives if their staff is getting overloaded and where to direct their resources for better productivity. This information will also support their decisions to hire more property managers or if building a team of in-house maintenance staff makes more sense.

5) Increase client satisfaction by providing business advice to clients

The Ticket Analytics Report is a great tool to use during management’s weekly meetings with HOA clients.  Key metrics in the report can help in providing board members with essential business advice to make the best decision for their community.  During these weekly meetings, managers can present all the work that has been completed by type of request, from work orders to tasks. Closed tickets versus created tickets can also provide a good indication of whether specific requests are taking too long to complete.  In this case, managers can dig deeper into their data in Pilera. Such advice to the board may be to solicit vendor bids that can reduce response time or enhance the architecture change approvals process to meet resident requests faster. The more informed business advice you provide to your clients, the longer they’ll want to stay with you.  It’s a win-win for all!

Whether your main goals are to improve operational efficiency or increase growth, the new Ticket Analytics Report in Pilera can provide valuable information to make important decisions.  Executives can utilize this report to make decisions that are important for scaling their company’s growth. Property managers can leverage key metrics in the report to provide their HOA clients/board members with critical business advice and increase client satisfaction.  To learn more about the new Ticket Analytics Report and how it can benefit your company and the communities you manage today, contact [email protected].


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. 

Community managers working on a maintenance project.

Efficiency is critical in your community’s work order life-cycle process as your team handles incoming maintenance requests amongst their other community management activities. Being able to see what tickets are open, tracking a ticket from receipt to resolution, who is assigned a ticket, and informing them as well as your residents of the status helps immensely to keep your operations running smoothly.  Therefore in this month’s Manager Toolkit series, we cover eight different helpful functions in Pilera to simplify your company’s maintenance lifecycle from receipt of the issue to resolution.

1). Ticket dashboard

Whether you are a manager leading a team in a community management company or are single-handedly overseeing the maintenance work in one or a few communities you manage, it’s critical to know what needs to be done for the day.  The manager who is leading a team might be interested in the open tickets that each employee or vendor has, to determine how to best triage new work orders that come in. Or, the property manager might just want to know only about their open work order tickets and the status of each.  In Pilera’s dashboard, you can sort by all communities or one specific community, type of ticket, status, category type, who the ticket is assigned to, date ranges, subject, and more. The dashboard will also show you any work order tickets that your residents have submitted via the resident portal that still needs assignment.   

2). Cross-community search

When a resident calls in or emails management, you can use the cross-community search in Pilera to find a resident’s record in any community.  Once you’ve found the resident, click on the “Quick Add Ticket” tool to add in the details.

3). Ticket assignment

You can assign a ticket right when you’re creating it so that nothing falls through the cracks and your company improves accountability.  The ticket can be assigned to yourself, another manager, or to a vendor. Through our vendor finder tool that we’ve developed earlier this year and that’s built inside ticket creation, you can easily select the vendor who is approved to work for the community based on the type of maintenance they perform.

4). Automated communications

Once you’ve submitted a ticket, an automated email will be sent to the assignee – you, another manager, or to the vendor.  They will receive pertinent information about the ticket such as the community name, type of ticket, status, contact information, assignee, and more so they can start working on it.  

5). Status changes & comments

As you obtain updates about the maintenance ticket, it’s critical to keep your team informed.  You can update the status of the ticket from “acknowledged” to “in progress”, add a predetermined quick response or a detailed comment via templates, reassign the ticket, add attachments, or update job details.

6). Notify the contact

When you create a new ticket, update the status, or comment on a ticket, you can choose whether to notify the resident.  A recent update also gives you as managers and property management staff greater control over ticket permissions for your residents.  You can choose to have residents view, edit, or comment on maintenance tickets that pertain to their unit in the resident portal.  

7). See actions or all comments

You may need to revisit a prior ticket for several reasons: to determine whether a maintenance issue was resolved in time, resident satisfaction with how the ticket was handled, or if compliance with internal maintenance procedures were met by staff.  Audit tracking is built into each ticket, which means that you can see every action that was performed on a ticket (status, comments, and more) from receipt to resolution by simply clicking on the ticket for more details.

8). Automated or on-demand reports

Board members are interested in knowing the status of all maintenance projects being worked on for their community.  For the board member meeting, you can export a “Community Meeting Report” in PDF format display. Pilera also offers many auto-generated and on-demand reports to help you gain a deeper insight into your community operations such as stale work orders that haven’t been touched for more than 30 days.  

Key Takeaways

Through your work order system in Pilera, you can gain cross-community insights, easily assign tickets, and keep your staff, board members, and residents informed on ticket updates.  Here are your key takeaways to make Pilera’s maintenance system, work the best for you and your team:

  • In the dashboard, filter on only the information you need to start out your day.
  • As you field a call, search for the resident\’s record and then click on the Quick Add Ticket tool to create a new ticket and put in all the details on the go.
  • Assign the ticket to yourself, another staff member, or a vendor and let our system take care of notifying them.
  • You can choose to automatically notify residents of an update and control visibility or editability of tickets in the resident portal.
  • Review actions performed on any ticket at any time including status changes and comments.
  • use the automated and on-demand reports to gain insight on which tickets are yet to be addressed or show off completed work during your board meetings.

We thank you for tuning in to our Manager Toolkit series and hope you enjoyed the tips on how to take your work orders to the next level.  Stay tuned as we bring you more tips and best practices on how to best use Pilera for your communities!