There’s so much to do when renting properties and managing them on behalf of your landlords. Some tasks need to be done every month. If they aren’t, you look unprofessional and your landlords become unhappy. We’ve heard a lot of estate agents and property management companies complain about generating monthly statements.
Let’s look at a day-to-day scenario
You look after 50 properties. Each belongs to a different landlord. Every month you have to send out a statement to each Landlord outlining how much rent was received, any charges / costs incurred and deducated, and the amount of rent that has been paid to the landlord. If you don’t have a property management system you probably have all your data in a spreadsheet. Let’s hope you’ve kept it up to date and not accidentally deleted the sheet or overwritten the values during the course of the month! So you’ve got your information. Now you have to ‘write up’ a Landlord rental statement. You work through your spreadsheet property by property, find the write numbers and change the values in your template letter document. That’s not all, you also have to manually type in the Landlord’s address, name and other details.
Not only is this time consuming, there’s also a lot of room for error!
How long does this take?
To write up each landlord rent statement you probably spend between 5-15 minutes. Let’s be optimistic and call it 5 minutes including proof reading. Once they’re all done you print them (assuming there are 50) it takes about 5 minutes to print them, collect them and check the quality is good. Now the fun part, you have to post these statements out to each landlord. You write their addresses, by hand, on each of the 50 envelopes. This takes you 20 minutes. You then fold the letters, insert into the envelopes, affix a stamp and head off to the post box. Let’s presume you’re really efficient and this takes you just 30 minutes. How much time have you spent generating your monthly rental statements?
If you weren’t adding up in your head as we went, let’s do it now.
- Write 50 landlord rental statements x 5 minutes = 250 minutes.
- Printing off the statements = 5 minutes
- Preparing the envelopes for postage = 20 minutes
- Putting each of the 50 letters in the correct envelope and posting it = 30 minutes
Total time taken = 305 minutes! That’s over 5 hours, just to send your monthly Landlord Statements. Whether you’re a small agency, or a large one, let’s presume you pay around £8/hour to your admin staff. You have one person who is responsible for your landlord statements. So the labour cost is £40. We’ll allocate another £1 per letter to cover postage and the envelope. That’s now £90 you’ve spend and half a day to generate your rental statements.
Remember, we said each statement takes about 5 minutes to prepare. Realistically, this could be longer if the supporting figures and documents aren’t easily available. If you take 10 minutes per statement, your monthly bill for landlord statements would be £74 in labour + £50 in materials = £124 total.
We haven’t even begun to think about photocopying invoices for work done and including copies with the statement either. This would increase the time taken to send out each statement. And as we said earlier, there’s lots of room for error in this process. Could you imagine how much your reputation would be damaged, and how much trust you’d lose if you sent the wrong statement to the wrong Landlord? It’s unthinkable.
What’s the alternative?
Luckily, there is a smarter alternative to the above process. The trick is to automate the process as much as possible. This will cut down on the amount of time needed to generate landlord statements, so you can spend more time doing what you do best. Managing property.
Investing in an easy to use property management tool will not only save you money in the long run, it’ll save you time too. On top of that, all your property information will be kept in one place, so you have a better hold on your business and its performance. Most property management tools, including ours will store your Landlords details, including their email addresses. Multiple Landlords per property? No problem, you can send a statement to each. Where you’d previously have to send out two letters, each tailored to the individual landlord, our property management software will email both Landlords, an accurate statement that’s personal to them, with little input from you!
Statements are prepared as soon as the rent is received, and can be automatically sent to the Landlord, or kept available for you to review before sending. That’s not all. Remember your spreadsheet? The one where you’d store the amount of rent due, the amount of rent received, and any other maintenance expenses? Our management software tracks all of that too! You’re not adding to your workload. You simply record the figures as you would have done on the spreadsheet, but instead of using the spreadsheet your use the Property Management Box software. If you’ve raised any extra charges during the previous 30 days, the software will intelligently find the relevant PDF invoices you’ve uploaded from your contractors and include a copy of each with the statement that’s going to be sent to the Landlord. This way the Landlord gets a copy of everything and you spend less time explaining charges to them. There’s complete transparency with your landlord and this helps you to build trust and strong relationships.
Get organised with Property Management Box
Our rental management software does so much more than just generate landlord rental statement each month. We took a long hard look at the tasks you perform each month and did our best to automate them, whilst keeping our user interface clean, simple to understand and easy to use.
Where other property management packages have thousands of features, and complicated menus, we strive to be simple. All the major tasks you need to complete are handled in just a few clicks. Letting you spend less time on administrative tasks, and more time providing a better services to your clients.
Talk to us for a free trial or call us now on 020 7043 8711
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