Property management can go paperless

Property management can go paperless

Be it hiring maintenance staff, managing inspections, handling contracts, or communicating with tenants, property managers need to document everything. The stakes are high. All bases must be covered. This essentially means a great deal of paperwork. Moreover, the properties need to operate smoothly to maintain value.

As every transaction involves high monetary value, it is critical to handle all documents, from floorplans to leases, to bills to tenant records to maintenance histories, diligently. For a long time, this used to be limited by the ability of human administrators, as it took expertise and experience to deal with such critical paperwork. There are many ways bad document management can destabilize a property management business. Costly human error, just one among those.

The case for a document management system in property management is a strong one, for reasons other than just ‘managing the paperwork’. From cost and time savings to better security, flexibility, and customer service, the reasons to digitally transform with a DMS are compelling.

Let’s dive deeper.

Property Management and its document needs

While it is necessary, paper is also a bottleneck to property management operations. Even if this may seem obvious, the opportunity cost of not transforming digitally with a document management system is harder to realize. Let’s explore five reasons why your property management business needs a document management system.

Productivity

One of the most pressing challenges we hear from property managers is productivity. Managing properties is a never-ending process that involves surprises at every turn and a low tolerance for letting things slip through the cracks. Monitoring the status of jobs and projects takes longer than actually doing them. Glitches and emergencies are part of the everyday job, causing interruptions both technically and operationally. Standardization in certain areas, with document management and business process automation, can make process and communication seamless and productive.

Document safety

Every single deal, registration, communication, and maintenance involves a vast amount of paperwork, making document safety invaluable to property managers. With such an amount of paper records on the edge, having an efficient DMS is vital to avoid any fatal damage to the business. A DMS has all the abilities to protect documents from accidents & theft. When all property documents are securely stored in a cloud-based DMS, the recovery and resumption of operations takes no time, in the event of any disruption.

Document security

Information is constantly in danger. A security threat could cost a property management company a reputation built over years of effort. In addition to document safety, property managers also need a secured document environment. This means, a balanced surveillance strategy is vital for a property management firm to check all things malicious – cybercrime, hacking, and other security vulnerabilities. On the other hand, a secure DMS offers multi-level encrypted storage as well as authorized access controls, while it also protects critical business data and business interests complying with regulatory requirements.

Real-Time Access From Anywhere, Anytime

Take for instance, a property manager in the field who needs to access a crucial tenant lease. Traveling back and forth to retrieve documents will result in crowded desks and tighter schedules. Property managers on the go can save time and be more productive with a feature like real-time document access on your smartphone or tablet, anytime, anywhere.  Moreover, additional tools like offline viewer work brilliantly in case of internet connectivity issues, enforcing seamless functionality without any pricks.

Need For Collaboration

When a property manager works on cross-team projects, there will be endless email chains, a volume of property records, and spreadsheets to achieve a common goal.  Visibility and accountability will be impossible without an integrated document management system that enables effective team collaboration. A hassle-free and collaborative document strategy results in inefficient productivity, success, and revenue. Additionally, it gives insight into more critical business areas that need attention.

The focus of property managers is not just to improve their document management system but also to streamline business operations. Hence, property managers require a productive, safe, secured, collaborative, time-saving system with access on the go. Having identified the needs, let us look at seven prominent features a DMS can bring to the table of a property management firm.

What are the useful features of a document management system for property management?

While the feature list of modern document management systems is long, there are quite a few features that particularly hold an appeal to property management firms. Six of these features are discussed below. However, keen property managers benefit a lot more.

Seamless document capture

To upload every document from various sources, whether paper or digital, is unimaginably time-consuming for a property manager. While it is an obvious feature of a DMS, document syncing and uploading is crucial to maintaining sanity in a storm of property documents. By enabling this feature, all employees on-field, in the office, and across departments can sync and upload documents automatically. Additionally, DMS like Tessi Docubase® supports uploads from a variety of sources. The uploaded documents are stored in a safe and secure cloud-based environment. Therefore, property managers can rest assured of capturing and storing property records. Further, features like dbs Live Forms optimize capturing of information in a structured and systematic way right at the source. In case physical documents need to be captured, Optical Character Recognition ensures that the information within the documents is intelligently indexed and searchable as well.

Indexing and searchability

A DMS works beyond capturing and storing documents. An innovative feature of searching and indexing helps find the right record at the right time. So you never lose a document ever. This intelligent document organizer automatically classifies the documents using specific patterns and appropriate tags. Modern document management systems like Tessi Docubase® unleash the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to further enhance pattern recognition for indexing and searchability. Also, you can use the full-text search to find information within documents instantly.

A comprehensive dashboard

Imagine watching all the moving parts of your business on one screen – The status of your leases, the due dates for rentals, upcoming repairs and expiry, ongoing negotiations, and more. All your workflows visible to you, and all your redundancies readily apparent, means your attention goes to that highest priority task at hand. This means a sense of control like never before. The dashboard gives an admin all the data related to – document access, the edits that take place, time spent on those documents, and version history are a few to name. Furthermore, a dashboard is a security measure, to save the integrity of your property management business. It enables the detection of critical errors, and malicious acts while keeping an eye on the progress of time-sensitive actions.

Tracking, audits, and version history

Version history enables you to view previous versions of the document and recognize changes made, in addition to identifying who made them. It helps to maintain information security and the integrity of all property documents. This also makes for easier audits and investigations. All of this becomes available within a few clicks, without the need of poring over the paperwork manually. Which also means, rules-based compliance can be enforced proactively.

Secure Sharing with Access controls

Real-time document sharing is invaluable to a document-intensive business such as property management. A document management system gives property management employees the freedom to carry confidential paper records while eliminating the risk of missing one. Share documents seamlessly with in-house employees, property management CRM, accounts management system, and clients with strictly enforced authorizations. Which means the property manager can control who can view, comment, edit, and access the shared document. Not to miss the seamless integration across emails, websites, and systems that allow sharing property files within seconds.

Workflow Automation

In addition, all repeatable tasks get automated with minimum friction. For example, documents get automatically directed through the chains of action and approval with automated alerts. This frees up a property manager’s, and their employees’ time to tackle more important business decisions, while menial but necessary tasks get taken care of. And even those decisions are better informed by all the data available at your fingertips. Tessi Docubase’s® rules-based business process automation engine is extremely customizable to your exact requirements.

Upgrade without the overhaul

Tessi Docubase® offers a complete platform of document management products from capturing documents to extracting high-value data, classifying that data into information, and incorporating it into existing business processes for enhanced productivity. This integrates seamlessly with all modern IT systems, including the ones you may already use for say, CRM and ERP. This means, a property management firm, or any firm for that matter, does not need to deal with the sunk cost fallacy of losing legacy investments in IT. In other words, a DMS like Tessi Docubase® can transform the way property management runs without the troublesome overhaul.