Data Entry Woes

I don't know if I'm just less patient than I used to be, but lately I've gotten so annoyed by my property's software and having to fill in prospective and current resident information over and over again in multiple places. I'm spending all this time re-entering data when there's more important stuff on my plate -- like tours, following up on leads, and renewals. It seems like such a waste of time and feels like the technology should be a little further along, that I shouldn't have to enter a prospect's info like 3 times, in 3 different places, all within the same system. Not only is this extremely time consuming, but also leads to tons of errors since the whole team has to enter so much data manually. Does this bother anyone else?

What kind of property management software are you using. I have not had this issue using Yardi.

I was at a property a number of years ago that actually captured most of the information off a person's photo ID (in my state, they are encoded with a magnetic strip on the back side). It was a reader smaller than a deck of cards and it worked great as a time saver. They also had an electronic application (prospective residents would use a terminal in the office, then print and sign it) that would automatically transfer the information the applicant enters into the PM software.

We use Yardi, a forms program, Outlook contacts, and an excel spreadsheet to store all of our resident info...so everything must be entered four times into four separate and very different databases! It is a pain, yes. But it beats the 1950's style ledger card system we used to use! When we first started using the computer databases, we had to back everything up by hand on the ledger cards too.

Be thankful we are not friends with carbon paper......

I sure don't miss carbon paper! There are some complexes here that still use the carbon copy applications, rental agreements, and ledger cards!

While carbon paper and ledger cards are pretty unforunate, I don't think they should be the standard by which we compare the performance of our software.

I agree with that and would say we have come a long way, and are able to automate or eliminate a lot of time consuming, redundant tasks.

Check out the year of the management software and see if there are updates that capture what you need. YARDI and RealPage as far as I am concerned are the two big dogs. I know personally that if you contact Realpage they will work with you on getting you what you want. At least they used to, have not dealt with them in a while.

@ Johnny I would love to have that reader you mentioned. I'll admit to not being the best at getting info, I'm too chatty and forget to fill in the entire guest card

I will admit there are times I miss the old carbon lease. Ours was huge like 2'x2' with 6 copies so you had to press real hard. Our availability was an excel type spreadsheet that listed the units and move out dates, then the new leases beside each unit. There was something really satisfying (I'm an instant gratification sorta girl) about using that yellow highlighter to mark a unit as being moved in

As to the matter at hand, I have used everything from cheap accounting software to Onesite and Yardi. I much prefer Onesite (RealPage). As Nate said RealPage is great for working with you and they have tons of add-ons; for a price.

Our company just switched softwares to Buildium, which is a web based software. They have several add ons, and once you enter everything once, you have it!