It’s 2019. Yet apartment complexes around the world are severely dependant on entirely manual systems to manage their communities. Remember the time when people were still wary to let their typewriters go and migrate to MS Office to digitalise office spaces? Office goers who have been used to a certain system for years and sometimes decades, felt uncomfortable trusting a machine with decreasing their workload. However, it has been considerable time since office spaces have been digitised and the glowing results are for everyone to see. The same goes for apartment management software with out dated accounting softwares, manual billing and collection at the management office and manual visitor entries for gate management at the entrance. While the caution is understandable, there is indeed no harm in trying it out.
Apartment management software are a one stop solution for all aspects of managing apartment complexes and gated communities. Be it financial management, clubhouse and facility management or gate management, the software takes care of every need. Most importantly, using a management software has several benefits. Listing a few of them:
- Paperless management committee. With one environment crisis breaking down on us after the other, it is only wise to switch to sustainable systems.
- Increased efficiency with reduced effort. Management committee members devote their time voluntarily to ensure a gated community runs smoothly. An apartment management software cuts down their workload and empowers them to serve their home better.
- Seamless record keeping. With a cloud based storage system, every resident and committee member can stay constantly updated with all management affairs of their community.
In this article, we will review how gate management ledgers are things of the past and apartment management software are the way forward.
Table of Contents
Too many ledgers for Gate Management
While there may not be something like too much chocolate, however, the concept of too many ledgers exist. A gated community depending on gate security ledgers or registers cannot function using just one dedicated register. There are several different ledgers for staff, visitors, delivery personnel increasing the probability of errors. An apartment management software comes integrated with gate management systems in place. Just one device is enough to keep records under multiple separate categories. Considering the records are synced to the cloud, it is accessible to the office bearers of management committees. Hence, security can be more efficiently supervised, not only by the guards on duty but also by the Association members.
Transience is Not Always In the Best Interests
Yes, we are all aware of how change is the only permanent feature of life and how change always leads to new beginnings. Unfortunately, that is not a notion anybody would like their gate security to follow. It may seem your security registers are safe from tampering on a daily basis. Let’s face it – your ledgers aren’t locked up in a vault or aren’t secured in a fort. It would practically take as much time as blinking to delete or change data in the ledger. At the outset, this does not feel like a big deal. Yet the consequences of such a loophole can be disastrous in the event of a serious incident. With apartment management software’s security modules, the risk of changing records becomes negligible. In a digital space, changing records aren’t easy and any attempt to tamper with records, always leave a digital trail behind.
The Gaps In Gate Management Ledgers Are Not Pretty
Who doesn’t like to just walk in and out of a gated complex? Who wants to go through the hassle of signing names and check in and check out times when you are probably in a hurry? No one. As a result, registers are often incomplete. While strict gate staff can still get each visitor to sign in with their names and phone numbers, they often miss the same visitors to sign out. So there is no way to track how long a certain visitor has remained in the complex. Nevertheless, management software have thought about this issue and created easy digital check in and check out systems. With dedicated techniques in place to identify authorised visitors and staff, such software are capable of cutting down on risks of impersonation. At the same time, since overseeing security becomes easier for management committee members, they can immediately alert guards in case of missing entries and immediately rectify such security flaws.
When Reviewing Records Need Good Biceps
Those biceps and triceps can get their required exercise in Cult.Fit or similar establishments. Reviewing records should not be a stressful job. No one deserves to carry heavy registers and ledgers and sit poring over bad handwriting for hours together to make sense of it all. Also, the bigger the community, the faster manual ledgers get over. Thus, when reviewing records, one has to go through a considerable amount of books. This automatically leads to a very lax supervision of gate security. Apartment management software makes evaluation ten times easier. For starters, one doesn’t need to make those annoying pilgrimage to the association office or security office to check records. A couple clicks on the smartphone or laptop and every record is neatly organised at the fingertips. The best part? All this can be done while watching Netflix and chilling.
Going Through The Same Thing Over and Over
Domestic helps, household staff, community staff, vendors, delivery personnel are few categories of individuals visiting gated communities everyday. Having regular visitors repeatedly making entries in a ledger everyday is unnecessary. It only contributes to queuing at the gates. Since a manual system cannot be supervised minutely, we often tend to take things easy and not keep proper records of daily visitors. A gate security module in management software helps to check in and check out daily visitors at just a click. It is fast, efficient and reduces queuing. These staff records can even be accessed by residents ensuring the community is indeed connected, in the true spirit of the term.
Piling Costs
Ledgers are not an ideal long term solution. They have to be constantly replaced with new ledgers. Their storage is another major issue. Throwing away security ledgers is risky and not preferable. Unfortunate incidents within the compound are always probable. Security records can go a long way to help resolve such problems. With incident reporting features and a paperless automated system, once again, the software scores over traditional methods.
Ledgers Do Not Help Security Guards with their Jobs
Let us understand the resources we employ to man our gates, are after all humans. As is the rule of the species, they are susceptible to flaws. Guarding gates is a demanding job. The guard must be alert and on toes every moment of their duty hours. It does not hurt to make their jobs a little easier. Apartment Management Software were not crafted with the aim to replace the accountant, the auditor, the management committee members or the security guards. They were designed to rise above human fallacies and empower the ones who make our homes safer and better. With SOS alerts, easy record keeping, hassle-free record retrieval, visitor management, the software helps guards to carry out their responsibilities to their full potential.
In the initial days, migrating to an apartment management software may feel like a risky big leap and even expensive. However, the pros of having a digital management system far outweigh the cons and contribute to healthy and noticeable return of investments.
Also, read Cooperative Housing Society Accounting – Best Practices.