From lease management to routine inspections, a lot of work goes into running a successful property management team. Without a strong property management workflow in place, it doesn’t take long for tenant agreements and rental applications to pile up and become overwhelming for your team. You might think you’d be better off outsourcing this work by hiring a property management company to oversee these processes, but that quickly becomes costly and inefficient. How can you manage these processes internally without overworking your team and risking errors? Consider adding automation to the mix!
Today, I’d like to share three quick ways you can automate the processes your team uses every day. With these processes, you can “set it and forget it” so your team has time to engage with tenants and improve overall quality of service at your property.
- Take the stress out of collecting rental applications.
As a property management organization, you’re inundated with rental applications on a daily basis. Instituting a process around how your team deals with this high volume of paperwork would certainly make a huge impact on the overall productivity and efficiency of your organization.
With Formstack Forms and Formstack Documents, you can automate how applications are completed, signed, collected, stored, and approved. Try starting with Formstack’s Rental Application Form template.
You can easily add a link or embed this form on your site so that future residents can easily complete the application when they are ready. You can even accept payments online if you intend to collect application fees with your form. Formstack easily integrates with Formstack Documents to make your data collection simple and easy with no required coding.
With a few clicks, you can link your Formstack Rental Application Form template to the Formstack Documents Rental Agreement template. This integration will use the data submitted by renters via Formstack to automatically populate your application template.
You can have completed application documents sent to your property site manager for approval or store them using your favorite third-party document storage application.
Now, you don’t need to worry about being overwhelmed by stacks and stacks of paper applications. With Formstack Forms and Formstack Documents, completed rental applications will be automatically sent to your management staff with payment when they are ready for review!
Read More: Streamline the Collection of Rental Applications with Formstack
- Manage financial transactions with ease.
For this tip, we want to take some advice from our friends at Kuester Management Group (KMG). KMG is a property management company specializing in community associations throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and West Virginia.
Prior to Formstack Documents, KMG was printing and manually completing check requests before they were signed and passed around the office for approval. For any property management firm, managing accounting records is critical, but as a third-party management company/fiduciary, well-documented, thorough approvals are central to KMG’s business model. Walking paperwork around the office was costing them hours of time, causing errors, and resulting in angry vendors. By automating their check request process with Formstack Documents, they estimate they’re saving at least 80 hours per month!
Read the full story: Learn more about how Kuester Management Group automates their document generation using Formstack Documents.
- Maintain detailed records of work orders and inspections.
From randomized seasonal inspections to tenant work order requests, your staff is managing a lot of paperwork to monitor the ongoing status of your properties. Depending on the number of properties you manage, completing inspections and prioritizing tenant work orders is a tedious, paper-heavy process.
But with Formstack Documents and UpKeep, a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) tool, you can cut the time your team spends on these tasks in half. Formstack Documents lets you easily integrate with UpKeep using Zapier.
Once you’ve added a checklist template to Formstack Documents, you’ll never have to waste time printing, storing, or searching for loose sheets of paper. Now, you can save your work orders or inspection reports with data collected from UpKeep (or another CMMS software) into your favorite third-party storage app.
Formstack Documents is here for your property management automation needs! If you’re ready to start streamlining your property management workflow, you can get started today with any of our real estate templates.
