Trust accounting swings on a single hinge: where is the money?

In the most simple trust accounting relationship, a tenant pays money to an owner. This is how basic trust accounting software works.

This works well when you have one tenant in each property, each owner owns only one property, and each property has only one owner. If this describes all the properties you manage, then any property management trust accounting software will work. However, most property managers are faced with one of these scenarios:

• An owner has more than one property.
• A property has more than one owner.

In these cases, a more complex financial relationship exists. One method to handle this is to make the owner an afterthought – putting the money into a property. (This is how the most well-known cloud-based software for residential property managers does it.)

However, this doesn’t really work. What happens when owner Jim has three properties, each with $200 in reserve, and one property has a water heater fail? That property has only $200, but the water heater replacement is $420.88. You cannot replace that water heater, because the property doesn’t have enough money. You can ask the owner to send you a check, but that seems odd, as the owner has $600 on account with you. So you move money to Property A: $200 from Property B, and $20.88 from Property C. Then you cross your fingers and pray for no emergency expenses on Property B or C. On rent day, you move the money back, and get the properties all back to normal. What a headache! What is a simple solution in real life – an owner paying a bill – becomes more work for you at the busiest time of the month.

HERO Harmony has a structure that represents the reality of your financial relationships.

A property management agreement can contain any number of owners and properties, and a lease can contain any number of tenants. This sure makes life easy! What’s more, it solves myriad other problems that formerly caused property managers to pull their hair out!

There are many problems that exist in current software offerings related to “Where is the money?”.  HERO Harmony solves them all.

So why are current software programs so limited? The answer is simple. Property managers have been willing to go through workarounds because there were no other options. Why didn’t cars have cruise control until the 1970’s – when the cruise control was invented in 1788? Drivers were willing to endure the problem until a fellow named Ralph became completely annoyed by a roller-coaster-like ride, and set about to fix it. Property managers have spent long enough creating workarounds. It’s time for a solution that works.  It’s time for HERO Harmony.