Last modified on July 18th, 2017
By Nat Kunes

How fast can you turn around your vacancy and move in a new resident? Quick turn around for apartments and houses is so important in our industry. You will always need a few days in between move-out and move-in to clean and inspect but the shorter you can make that window, the more money you can make. We’ve made it pretty easy to minimize this window with AppFolio’s work order functionality.

Recurring Work Orders – Set It And Forget It
The nice thing about reccurring work orders is that you can set them up to trigger at certain times. For example, everyone inspects a unit after a move-out to make sure that there are no damages. You can set up a recurring work order for an inspection to occur right after the resident moves out. If you have other standard maintenance tasks like carpet cleaning, or even the monthly gardening service, you can add these too. These work orders will be triggered automatically – saving you the effort of scheduling them and also making this process much faster for you and your staff.

Once the work order is automatically created, you can email your vendor the work order right away, so you get the work done sooner. You can also pay vendors using ACH so you don’t even have to write them a check!

Easily Tie Work Orders to Invoices
When you enter a work order, you can tie it to a bill and generate an invoice. This invoice is always attached to the work order so it is easy to pass on the charges to the resident or property owner. For example, if a resident breaks a window, you can create a work order for the broken window, send it to your vendor, and charge the resident for it with just a couple of clicks.

Warnings That Help With Compliance
One of the things we’ve added recently to work orders helps our property management customers stay compliant. For example, you can enter into AppFolio the date of home warranty expiration – if that property is under a home warranty and you go to put in a work order, AppFolio will warn you. You can avoid the hassle and expense of accidentally spending money to repair an item that is already under warranty!

We also have fields in AppFolio that track the year a home was built. There are many EPA regulations (with expensive fines!) around the notification of lead-based paint in the home. When you generate a work order for a property that was built before 1978, AppFolio will warn you so that you can hand out the appropriate lead-based paint information pamphlets.

In addition, on the Vendors page in AppFolio you can track important details about each vendor:

• Worker’s Compensation Insurance Status
• Liability Insurance Expiration Date
• If the vendor is EPA Certified and if they have taken a special class regarding the lead-based paint laws.

When you create a work order and assign it to a vendor that has expired liability insurance AppFolio will alert you to this issue. This really helps avoid mistakes and provides safeguards that can help protect property managers from lawsuits.

Bottom line – make sure you’re taking advantage of all that AppFolio’s work order functionality has to offer.