Underutilized Yardi Best Practices You Need to Know

Even if you use Yardi as your real estate management tool of choice on a daily basis, chances are you could be overlooking a few best practices intended to make your life easier. You may feel like you have mastered Yardi software, or you may feel like you have a long way to go. But with such a robust and multifunctional tool, there are always more tips and tricks to add to your wheelhouse. That’s where we come in.

Our team of independent Yardi consultants at Saxony Partners has collectively decades of hands-on property management experience. After all, using Yardi software every day is what inspired our Yardi Consultant Meagan Stuesser to begin the next chapter of her career in Yardi training and consulting. Here are a few underutilized Yardi best practices recommended by Iris and our Saxony team of experts.

Use your documentation tools correctly.

Disorganization happens when you store your documents in all the wrong places. “Always use ‘attachments’ to store invoices, correspondence, contracts, and leases,” Stuesser said. “Use ‘memos’ to document conversations between tenants and staff, notes about a particular unit, and specifics about incidences. Keep everyone abreast of issues and important documents at your fingertips.”

Make sure to set up property attributes.

“Set up attributes to group properties, territories, funding sources and other identifiable characteristics,” Stuesser said. “This will empower you to create custom analytics based on your company’s set of values.”

Use the report scheduler tool.

“Save time by scheduling specific reports or report packets ahead of time instead of running them on the fly, which can bog down the system and interfere with performance,” Stuesser said. “Reports can be configured, scheduled to fire at specific dates and times, and sent directly to users’ inboxes.”

Look to the training menuset feature for guidance.

“For those that do not have eLearning or feel comfortable allowing users access to Client Central, Voyager has a training menu set that can be added to any user group,” Stuesser said. “Users can feel empowered and learn on their own by watching short videos on most Voyager functions.”

Admins: don’t forget about security analytics.

Having trouble accessing crucial functionality? You can diagnose the problem yourself with this essential tool.

“The Permissions Exceptions report allows admins to drill down to what’s causing a user’s ‘access denied’ message by providing the permission(s) tied to functionality,” Stuesser said.

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If you find yourself struggling with Yardi implementation, operations, or best practices, sometimes it helps to have an outsider’s perspective. At Saxony Partners, we help our clients implement Yardi best practices and maximize efficiency every day.

“By training our clients in best practices, we ensure that the Yardi system is running at peak performance and our clients’ business goals and needs are met,” Stuesser said. “Our team benefits from our combined years of experience and access to up-to-date Yardi education and training materials. We can, in turn, share our knowledge-base with clients.”