Gabfocus Spotlight: What reports should I look at in my Property Management Software?

Your property management software probably came with an array of different reports. With so many options, it can be overwhelming to know which ones to choose! 

In this GabFocus Spotlight, Steven Jeffers of Bee Safe Storage, Brian Ward of USA Storage Centers, and Erika Weidman of Premier Pines Storage share which reports they look at on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. 

Question: "What reports should I look at in my Property Management Software?"

Check out the video clip below to hear their answer:

In this Gabfocus Session: Choosing Your Property Management Software, we spoke with Steven Jeffers (Bee Safe Storage), Brian Ward (USA Storage Centers), and Erika Weidman (Premier Pines Storage). We had a great time examining the ins and outs of different property management software systems. 

Check out the full Session to dive deeper! 

Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what the experts had to say:

The management summary is great because it just gives that high level picture of how your facility is doing on a day to day basis. Since I deal with multiple facilities, I use what Store Edge calls a facility comparison report. I can do either a day to day kind of snapshot or a monthly snapshot of just how each facility is doing during the time period that I select. And then we sell merchandise at our facility. So I look at the merchandise inventory list every month to see how my managers were, how well they were doing it, selling merchandise and what's selling what's not. What do we need to put on discount? What do we need to stop selling? What do we need to get more of? Those are probably the top three I look at on a day to day basis. - Steven Jeffers

The management summary is an invaluable tool. I encourage every manager should be looking at that daily know where they sit. It gives you the snapshot. The state of the Union, if you will, of your store for that day. I use the consolidated management report on a weekly basis to group all my stores together. But on a store level, as a manager, when I was a manager, I used the vacant unit report is very helpful. They tell me not only what I have available, what is un-rentable, what is being reserved for who, and I can see ok, this person has reserved for this day and it's past this date well, I need to figure out why they haven't come back or take it off being reserved. Another good tool and we were talking about following up with online rentals is a good tool for managers is if you go let's say we go into April to run a move in, move out report for March and sort it by move in. So just prints all your move ins for March and then going through every one of those and making sure we have a completed lease, we have a driver's license, we have proper noting that we followed up on online rentals. And that's what I encourage our managers to do. Just so we have a secondary layer of follow up. If we've missed an email or things of that nature, that's what we use. - Brian Ward

Well, when we took over the facility, the one we used all the time was the unsigned storage agreement report because that easily showed us who hadn't signed their leases yet and so that was invaluable because we had just taken over and we needed everyone. The economic occupancy also we could see who's paying lower rents and where we need to get to. Where we want to get to. We were in a kind of, like, a lease up situation. So that vacancy report we run that all the time and just the overall manager, just the dashboard just to look at our dashboard can give us a pretty good picture of what's going on. - Erika Weidman