Why the Document Management System Matters for Property Managers
1. It’s Revenue Beyond the Rent Checks
Property managers and those working in the property management profession face many difficulties when it comes to securing stable revenue: Tenants sometimes default on rent, there are numerous unexpected maintenance fees, routine wear and tear, and many other factors for which to account.
Whether in residential or commercial, most property managers look to filling all their spaces for rent as their main source of income. However, there’s an easier way to go about securing enough income, and it entails using a document management system to make property management easier.
No, using a document management system won’t literally put extra cash in your inbox, but it will produce positive, visible results to your bottom line that far exceed the up-front costs of using the software—especially if the software is sold on a subscription model like eFileCabinet’s. Implementation (particularly of the cloud-based solution) is a breeze, and for most property managers, eFileCabinet costs as little as $50 per month per user.
So, for only $50 per month, you can go paperless, put all those tedious paper documents into digital form, and immediately eliminate the costs associated with losing, searching for, scanning, faxing, and printing information.
Think these costs aren’t hefty? Think again: The Paperless Project reports that the average office worker wastes 30-40% of his or her time looking for information locked in email and filing cabinets. The typical organization also loses a paper document every 12 seconds, and each lost document costs $350 – $700. This means that a property manager that spends $50 up-front on a subscription to use eFileCabinet’s document management system will save tens of thousands of dollars.
Additionally, using the best document management system ensures your data is backed up every 24 hours by SSAE 16 certified data centers. This means that in the event of a natural disaster, your data will be backed up and recouped, protecting you from potentially devastating data losses and breach of your tenants’ information.
But the typical document management system and its bottom-line-saving-abilities do not stop at disaster mitigation and recovery: document management technology also prevents data breach with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption, and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)-adherent technology for data both in transit (via a client sharing portal), and at rest.
The client sharing portals of a typical document management system use this advanced encryption to circumvent the breach-susceptible aspects of email. Yep, you heard right: Email is not as safe as you think, and it’s not safeguarded from data breach.
In fact, email malware steadily goes up more than 25% year-over-year on average, and in 2014, five out of six large companies targeted by hackers experienced email attacks. That means more than 80% of companies attacked could’ve sidestepped email breaches with a client sharing portal, including the costs of data breach that come with it.
Using a client sharing portal could literally save you hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, think twice before sending that email attachment with one of your tenant’s social security numbers.
2. The Document Management System Supplements IoT (Internet of Things) in Property Management
IoT (Internet of Things) technology is not only one of the key inventions that changed the course of document management system innovation, but also the technology that most significantly impacted the role of the document management system in the property management industry.
Much like a document management system, IoT enables low-cost operational effectiveness, and overlaps with DMS at the automation process. For instance, property managers can organize IoT technology within any given property or number of properties to monitor temperature, liquid levels, and motion, signaling to property managers when certain changes fall outside the parameters they have specified.
This not only reduces the number of trips property managers have to make to their respective properties, but IoT technology also alerts them as soon as there is an issue, ensuring the issue is repaired quickly and therefore is less likely to cause irreparable damage to the property.
However, IoT only resolves a small chunk of the operational issues property managers face. The retention, storage, collaboration, and turnaround times for documents and other specified pieces of content remain unchecked by the document management system, and should be left to document management technologies for a variety of reasons, particularly for larger property management organizations.
Otherwise, ledgers, owner files, invoices, receipts, regulations, by-laws, covenants, tenant files, payment records, real estate contracts, and project management agreements become more difficult to locate, retrieve, and manage.
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