We consider business automation to be one of our specialties. Many companies are not familiar with business automation and how it can help to streamline your business. To help you better understand business automation we have broken out the basics into an easy to understand format.

What is Business Automation?
Business automation is a process that occurs when a team analyzes your company's daily activities and develops a custom software application to improve overall performance.

My company and its' employees perform a variety of tasks. What exactly will be analyzed?
Our team will come to your facility and discuss your company and its' activities to get an idea of the basic areas that need to be analyzed. Then, we will setup times that fit into your schedule for our representatives to meet with the managers of each division of your company. The manager will go over his/her basic duties, their team's activities, measures that they track or would like to track, and discuss reporting needs. Our representatives will use this information and their experience to develop a system design that will improve the performance and efficiency of each division of your company.

How does Business Automation relate to the property management industry?
Most property management companies perform the following tasks:

- Inventory properties
- Track contracts, lease terms, and tenant information
- Receive tenant work orders for property maintenance
- Employee Management
- Vendor Management
- Advertise available properties
- Reporting
- And more

How would you like a custom application built to serve all of your needs? In the long run you can save money by decreasing your staff and improve your efficiency in all areas. Imagine how the following scenario compares to your current process.

Website Leads
You have an available property that is automatically displayed on your website by a click of a button. A person looking for a rental clicks that the are interested and submits their info to you. It is stored in a database and emailed to an address, managed by you, from your software database. Within minutes the person sees the property and your sales rep is calling them back!

Process Tenant Paperwork
Let’s assume this person decides to rent your property. Your sales person can login to the application and view areas specific to the sales team. They choose the property and mark the property as a "pending rental." You may have specific forms that your prospective tenants fill out. We could convert them to an online form and they could complete the application online from home or from your office. If they are approved you can print the forms out at your office and have them come in and sign the documents. This may save your team a lot of time processing tenant applications. Throughout credit processing, application processing and other stages you can update the person’s status in your tenant tracking system. They can be separated as prospective, past and current tenants.

Tenant Management
Imagine logging into a secured area to view all of your tenants and their pertinent details such as contract, lease information, contact information, past and current maintenance requests, and more. This type of system can be helpful in various ways. For one, you can have a tenant login on your website for them to submit maintenance requests. They could also see the status of the request and when to expect someone to come out and fix the problem. You may need to contact them and your employees could simply go to the site and lookup the tenant’s contact information. In addition to these examples we can have it track payments, late payments, and total payment history.

Rental History
Your new application will link all past and current tenants to their rental properties. This is a great way to track overall lifetime profits per property, historic maintenance which can include labor hours and even associate a vendor to allocate total expenses per maintenance problem.

Employee Management
Manage your employees through your secured web based application. You will have the ability to fully manage their contact information, position, responsibilities, their accessibility from within the application and more. A great feature is tracking their compensation and having it allocated to various areas of the site to manage profitability.

A few examples of this are listed here.

- Sales Representatives - $10 per hour + commission. Each tenant they get to sign a contract will be recorded in the system with their employee id number. Their weekly schedules are maintained in the database. So simply run a report by week or month to see how much they made vs. business brought in to see how efficient they are at their job.
- Maintenance Workers - $10 per hour. Each maintenance job performed will be recorded into the system. Their weekly schedules are also maintained in the database. They can also record whether the job was complete and/or if parts were needed. If you manage a parts database and its cost we can record total cost per job, per rental, etc. Specifically for employee efficiency we would look at hours worked, jobs scheduled, jobs completed and total cost of employee

Vendor Management
Track the vendors that you use for outsourcing maintenance and for ordering parts. Maintain a parts database for job costing. You may also want to associate vendors with what they do for your business to assist with contacting the right party to place part orders and service requests. In addition to usage you may find that the reporting is beneficial as well. Track how much you spent with each vendor and for what purposes. You may find that another vendor does the work in half the time so even though their rates may be higher the total cost is cheaper.

Ready to take the next step?
Your business automation package is fully customizable for your business. This is just a brief overview of some of the key features that we can provide to you. In addition, you will not only receive an internal application to improve your business processing but also an entire public website to help promote your properties! This will also be the area that your tenants will go to in order to login and use their end of the application. If you are ready to take the next step contact us at AppDevel.com, Inc., today. We look forward to hearing from you!