Checklist when choosing a property management system

A property management system is imperative if you want to free your time to other things. Managing rentals can be a headache and if you are lucky, it can be a seemless system. We offer the piece of mind when it comes to managing rentals, here are some of the things you must look at, to prevent yourself from getting yourself into another headache.

Features	Why
1. Auto-reconciliation	Matches tenants and their payments instantly
2. Automatic Billing & Bulk Billing	This removes the need of physically sending invoices, one by one. By a click of a button everyone is billed instantly
3. Utility Billing	This enables the manager/landlord to bill per consumption across all properties, it could be water or electricity.
4. Receipting	Once a tenant pays, the system recognizes the payments and issues digital receipts to the tenants instantly
5. Lease management	Lease management is imperative as it can affect your property greatly. It protects your property from external damages by the tenant and dictates how the property is paid, by when and the amount. A software that can issue and track this is very important
6. Lease storage	Storage of leases is very important, this prevents misplacement of leases. Picture a tenant who has taken you to court over something that was clearly covered in the lease, but you cannot prove it was because you cannot trace it
7. Tenant management	Can the property management system store the tenants KYC, their payment history, receipts, allow them to issue & track maintenance requests among others?
8. Send reminders	This is one of the no brainers when choosing a property management system. Can the system send reminders to tenants to pay rent
9. Expense Management	As money comes in, so does it go out. One place where you can monitor all expenses in regards to your property.
10. Maintenance tracking	One place where you can have all the maintenance requests tracked in real time. Saves you the hustle of trying to remember everytime
11. Service scheduling	Services have to be scheduled e.g Elevators, extinguishers need servicing. This ensures the property is compliant in case of any accidents
12. Financial reporting	Reports are very important in knowing the health of your property, especially in real-time, you can make projections and decisions based on this
13. Record keeping	Will you be able to access records for 1 year ago? If not, then the importance of having a system is defeated.Especially when the tax man comes calling
14. Role based permissions	If you have someone that does the rental management for you, ensure that this is a tick when it comes to choosing your rental management system.
15. Data protection	If the property management system doesn’t have the ODPC certificate. Run! Your data needs to be protected and the certificate is proof of adherence to this