How—and Why—to Choose Condo Property Management Software
You want your condominium association to operate smoothly, meet all its responsibilities in timely fashion, and serve the best interests of your residents as well as your Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions (CCRs). That desire to get things done—and do them the right way—probably motivated you to volunteer as a condo association administrator in the first place, so you could promote the friendly neighborhood vibe that makes your neighborhood a great place to live.
Your condo association needs people like you to support its property values and uphold the best interests of your fellow residents. To make your work as productive—and as easy—as possible, you need condo property management software.
But not just any condo property management software. You need the right condo property management software to streamline your work effectively. Of the many condo property management software packages you’ll find, not all of them make an equally valuable contribution to what you do.
Here’s how to choose the right condo property management software for your community—and why these tools should be part of every condo administrator’s workflow.
Tame your time-eating challenges
Condo property management software transforms manual, repetitive tasks with “do-it-once” automation. What does that mean for you as a condo association administrator? For one thing, you’ll never again have to prepare a batch of individual invoices for dues and fees. Instead, you’ll enter the details of your dues item into an intuitive online interface, tell the system how much to bill and when to bill it, and sit back while modern software technology invoices your residents and collects their payments through a secure online interface.
Condo property management software also tames the tedium of document management. Instead of a file cabinet and a photocopier, now you’ll have a secure online document repository that you can organize with a straightforward folder structure—and set up to make all your files are accessible to the right people whenever they want to download them. No more “Can you send me this file?” e-mail exchanges, just anytime access with full control of permissions.
In fact, the overall advantage of condo property management software is its ability to anticipate what you need to do and simplify processes that you never thought you could speed up. With the right condo property management software at your service, you now have time to invest in community relations and other essentials that routine tasks used to sideline.
Make efficiency convenient
Some community association management software spotlights efficiency at the expense of an intuitive learning process. With some packages, your path to understanding what the software can do for you climbs a steep hill because the product appears to have been developed by experts for experts. That’s not the approach you want.
Ideally, look for condo property management software that prioritizes easy learning—with ample resources to guide your learning curve. Everyone’s learning style is different, and the resources that make condo property management software easy to grasp should match the way your mind works. For optimal learning convenience, you want to be able to choose detailed, step-by-step instructions that cover every aspect of a feature, opt for illustrated how-to guides that combine “show” with “tell,” and watch instructional videos that walk you through a process as it unfolds.
Keep data secure
Flexible, versatile condo property management software derives a significant portion of its value from the feature set it offers you, but without the peace of mind you gain from solid data security, it doesn’t deserve your trust. After all, your residents provide you with their personally identifiable information, and it’s your responsibility to respect their privacy.
That’s why—for example—you want condo property management software that integrates secure online payments without storing any of your residents’ payment information on your website itself. Instead, the secure payment processing capabilities of your condo property management software take care of financial details so you don’t need to worry about them.
Likewise, you want full security for your login process, so residents enter their passwords to access your condo property management software but you aren’t responsible for maintaining them.
The same diligent approach to full security should dominate every aspect of your condo property management software, so you can restrict access to online content, post material only for specific committees or your board, and ensure that all your data remain protected.
At HOA Start, we’re experts in providing the condo property management software to support the needs of communities such as yours. Put our thoughtful approach to community management to work for your condo association.
