Need management software advice

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1

I have been using a 3rd party billing company for my monthly bills, but most of these companies do not want to deal with a small park. Lots of big talk but little action. By small I mean 42 spaces and only 25 occupied. So, I guess I will have to use software to generate my own bills and the biggest problem is calculating the water and sewer bills correctly. Everything else is pretty easy. Any ideas for what might work?

Here are some other considerations:

  1. Some of the meters are in cubic feet(old AMCO) and others are in gallons(new Neptune). Switching over to gallon meters as the old ones wear out.
  2. I use a Mac and am something of a Luddite.
  3. I would like the software to print the bills.
  4. Ideally, I would plug in the monthly meter reads and the lot number and the program would do the rest.
  5. I really don’t need accounting software as I use a very simple Excell program that meets all my needs.
  6. I may have forgotten something and would appreciate if people could point out what I might be missing. I may not realize that I need something else.
  7. I may also turn this over to a VA I have used in the Philippines or the manager and let one of them do the work. I would assume this would mean cloud software, right?

Is this realistic? If so, what do you recommend?

Thanks.

2

I’m planning to use Rent Manager, which has all of these capabilities. I spoke with them last week to answer my questions and it’s powerful software for a reasonable price…

3

You can have a VA set up an excel spreadsheet, then mail merge into Word for the invoice printing.
Excel would hold your sites, tenant name, and unit of measure and the per unit cost for water. This is where you would do your data entry. It could also handle any conversion from cubic feed to gallons.
Then the mail merge would make it all pretty in an invoice

4

Take a look at Tenant Cloud (www.tenantcloud.com) and see how that program works for you. It is FREE for less than 75 units. Great reporting tools, online payments, online invoicing to tenants, there is an App for it as well where tenants can pay, submit work order requests, and you can even track inventory for the equipment you own in each of the trailers.

You can also set up recurring bills for water, etc.

There is also Cozi (www.cozi.co), but not as versatile as TenantCloud.

I manage 4 parks using this application and have not had an issue…even made it easier for our accounting professional with the exported reports

Good Luck.

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5

Thank you everyone for this info and I am looking into all of it.

After contacting over a dozen utility billing companies, I am giving up on them and doing it myself. If you are one of the big boys like Frank et al, they might work. Small parks? Forget it.

We had a VA set up a really simple Excel form/program for this month. A bit cumbersome to use, but it worked and we can either refine it or go with one of the vendors that was recommended here. Neither option is as difficult as I had envisioned.

6

Lots of our clients are happy with them

Hope it works out for you!

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@Rolf, I also use Tenant Cloud. I am very happy with it, and, like @Ops.Harmhold mentioned, it is free for less than 75 units.

8

We bill water, sewer, trash and gas back to residents. I use Parksidekick. Once you punch in the unit cost it is very easy to produce bills. It also tracks home payments etc… I run the main program in my house, and the managers can log in and produce invoices, enter payments (if you run your business so managers collect), produce late rent lists, late notices etc…
Also- there are no monthly fees- Pay once and your done unless you want ongoing tech support.

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