What

• Having to run a report each time you want to know if everything is going as expected can become tiresome
• Executives who want to stay on top of their metrics have developed a cadence of regular meetings and reports to highlight any variances
• While regular meetings and report are a good practice, things still fall through the cracks
• Variance Alerts are programs that constantly run in the background and check on things
• For example, Variance Alerts can be set up to monitor situations such as :
• Service Tickets still open after 10 days
• Leases expiring within 30 days
• Rent payments overdue by 2 days
• Lease applications with no action taken in past 5 days
• Typically an email or text message is sent to the concerned individuals when a variance is detected

Benefits of Variance Alerts :

• Variance Alerts enable companies to avoid events that could result in financial loss, or loss of tenant confidence or employee morale
• Other benefits :

• Fewer “fire drills” trying to solve problems
• Higher employee morale
• Higher tenant satisfaction
• More control over time
• Better financial results
• Better control over business processes
• When employees know that managers will be alerted if something is not on track, they can become proactive about completing their tasks or asking for help

Challenges :

• Some property management systems are “closed” and don’t allow queries to be made against their data (such as through an API or direct database connection)
• Some companies can create too many Variance Alerts, causing recipients of notifications to ignore them
• People can start relying too much on automated Variance Alerts that they don’t proactively look at reports or discuss the variances in regular meetings

Solutions

• To create a Variance Alert, we extract relevant data from the property management system and evaluate it
• For example, to implement the alert “Service tickets open more than 10 days”, we would setup an automated job that queried the property management system :
• The query would look at all tickets that are in open status and whose “Open” date is 10 days or more before today
• If it found any tickets in that state, the job would sent a text message or email to designated people
• The job would be set to run, say, twice a day