How often do you hear the buzz about the newest laptop, tablet, or mobile device that is being released? Each and every day improvements within technology are implemented within a social and professional setting, becoming a “norm” in today’s society. Having the opportunity to utilize software to manage your vendors flawlessly – without stacks out paperwork and endless phone calls – is beneficial to property management companies for many reasons.

Property management platforms provide you with a simple way to virtually mange your vendors on both the web and mobile devices, allowing you to interact with a vendor company, or specific vendor employee instantaneously. Having an easy channel of communication and tracking saves time, money, and resources, and when building teams know what is going on in real time, it reduces the amount of issues or potential risks flying under the radar.

Certificate of Insurance out of date? A contract you need on file? Contact information requested? Tasks you need to dispatch out to vendors for completion? The right software tools make all of these issues resolvable with just a few simple steps (or clicks!).

So how does this all work? Below are three work order workflow examples of how property management software can help manage vendors and automate the process.

1. When a work order is created, an email notification goes to the vendor company. In this case, the vendor does not have username/login for the software, so the property management team will update the Work Order Request Status when they receive updates from the vendor company.

2. When a work order is created, the primary vendor contact receives an email notification from the property management system. In this case, the primary vendor contact does have username/login for the software, so the primary vendor contact will update the Work Order Request Status when he or she receives updates from the field.

3. In this scenario, the vendor company and vendor employees have usernames/logins and can access the property management software via web or mobile. So when a work order is created, vendor employees act as an extension of the property management team and update the Work Order Request Status and work is updated and completed.

If you’d like to learn more about incorporating vendors into your operations platform, check out our blog here, which details which vendors make the best candidates, the value proposition to your vendors, and how to get started.