Managing Systems

I am a newbie and have a question regarding how bills are paid and/or service calls. If you are following the thought process of having a manager on site, living in one of the homes, how are you then handling maintenance request calls? I presume they are taken by the manager, who then dispatches the work out, depending on the level of need? Do you have a threshold in which they can make decisions before it escalates to you? Do they contact you each time for approval and/or payment? I would like to think that some of this can be automated to a degree. Curious on how everyone does it. Thank you!

@tycross81

I think it will depend on your comfort level. In terms of payment, you want that done at your level ( i.e. NOT the manager) . You will have to be able to verify work is completed as well especially if you are remote. Now on a Park Owned Home, that will depend on how you are setup. If you are at 100 units with a lot of homes , you might have a maintenance guy on site . Work flow could be manager gets the request and dispatches work order to him. If its too small or too few homes you will probably want to have PRE APPROVED vendors the you have vetted and have some understanding of price ahead of time. I like the idea of a threshold and that may be what you are comfortable with approving, 200, 500, 1000. You will still want to keep tabs on invoices that your manager approved below threshold to verify work was completed (think picture verification upon completion).

If you are a newbie , it might be worth setting up no threshold or very low just so you understand what comes up and how your manager handles it. As time progresses, you can always up it etc depending on the level of competence that gets established.

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We allow the managers to have a small petty cash account. Each manager is taught how to track the expenses in this account through Rent Manager and is responsible for inputting journal transactions each time they use the money and uploading the receipt.

The typical items they use this money for are things like paying pest control to do a one time treatment, buying paper and printer cartridges, buying staging materials for showing a home, etc. Mostly things that are less than $100.

For anything else, our approval is required and we handle paying the vendor. At the end of every month, we bring the account balance for the petty cash up to it’s original amount, usually $250-$500.

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Thank you both. I appreciate the feedback and it is very helpful.

We give our managers a credit card and petty checking account. We still have to approve all expenses and they submit expense reports & receipts. Anything big has to be paid by HQ but small things (pest control or toner is a perfect example) they can pay themselves. It’s a matter of control versus hassle. It’s more hassle to approve or pay everything yourself especially if you are remote. But you maintain control and “see” everything. As you get more comfortable you can delegate. It’s true with any system.

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