Benefits of Vendor Management

As a property manager, your days are filled with communicating with and managing your tenants and owners of different companies and different properties. These are the people directly involved in all of the units and properties that you manage, and it makes sense that a lot of your time as a property manager would be spent with them. But the other important group of people that are more indirectly involved, but still just as important, are all of your vendors for maintenance and upkeep! The way you manage these relationships is different from owners and tenants, and are necessary to keep your properties in great shape!

Adding Vendors

The first step of vendor management is having vendors to manage! There are a bunch of different ways to find vendors to work with, some that you already know from past projects, some might be referred to you by the different property owners and tenants, some you might just find online. In any case, once you have found a vendor that you want to work with, you can add them directly to your online property management software to store their information in the system and be able to assign them to maintenance requests and work orders! With each vendor, you can create and specify vendor roles as well as choose if they have online access or not. Here, you can also set some terms about their bill and preferred contact method as well as a few other informational pieces so you can look at the vendor on the online system and get all the information you need right there!

Assigning Vendors

Now that you have your vendors set up in the system, you can start connecting them with work orders and maintenance requests for your properties and units! With any work order, you can assign any vendor that you have in the system to it, which will then pop up for them on the system if they have online access, or can also be delivered to them via email. When a work order is put in, it will also bring up some suggested vendors based on the type of work that needs to be done. You can also filter your work orders by vendor, to see if any vendors are backlogged in the system or if there are any that would more easily be able to take an order. Also from these maintenance requests, once a vendor is assigned, you can message them directly from the work order, and can have them edit any information about the details of the work order. However you want to set up your work orders for your properties, having your vendors in the system makes it a lot easier!

Managing Vendors

In addition to being able to assign vendors to maintenance requests directly through the system, you will also be able to do some more administrative duties with them through the system as well. Just like tenants and owners, you can message vendors directly through the system over either email or text, and can easily look through your message history with them. You also have a detailed account journal for each vendor that you can look through for help with your accounting work, both past and current. You can then also set future payments up if need be, and can even sort vendors by their current balance. You can also add attachments to any of your vendors with any pictures or documents that might relate to them. In this way, you will be able to manage them through the system just as viably as you manage your tenants and your company owners!

Building Vendor Relationships

Even though you will most likely be communicating and working with vendors less often than tenants and owners, it’s still very important that you build up a good relationship with them. Having people you can rely on when an urgent maintenance issue arises is unparalleled, and setting up the vendor within Property Matrix does wonders to help that. Now, you will never miss a payment or an email, and can easily assign work orders out to your trusted team of vendors. Schedule a demo with Property Matrix today to see how else we can help your maintenance needs!