Sometimes maintenance is simple. Sometimes it’s not.

In a simple case, a tenant submits a Work Request with a nice explanation and video of their issue. You generate a Work Order, assign a vendor, and send out the system template email. The vendor completes the work, clicks the loginless link to report work is complete, and sends an invoice. Harmony takes care of all this with only a few clicks and taps from you.

We all dream of a day when every maintenance issue is smooth and easy, every tenant communicates clearly and is available as needed, and every vendor is on time and on budget. But reality strikes, and complexity invades.

For this, Harmony has amazing maintenance tools to streamline your operation. We’ve covered things elsewhere like vendor job logs, vendor estimates, preferred vendors, vendor suitability (performance and review metrics and rank), appointment confirmation, work order invoices, routine maintenance, appliance warranties, and a host of other Harmony features.

Sometimes you’ll have a situation where a project requires a competitive bid process. Harmony has you covered there, too, with Quote Requests (RFQs).

When you create a quote request, you specify the details of the project, information about the RFQ, and include as many vendors as you wish in the bidding process. Each vendor receives notification of the RFQ with the opportunity to submit a bid, or estimate the work if they want to participate but are unable to quote a total.

RFQs can be sealed, where each vendor bids in isolation, open, where each vendor sees other vendors and bids, or anonymous, where vendors can see other bids, but not the vendors who submitted them.

Your quote request provides a handy graph of the received bids with range and details, including respondents, average and median bid, low bidder, and each vendor’s response date and comments (as required by your RFQ Instructions). From here, you can select the bidder to award the project to, and create a work order for the work to be done. The work order is tied to the quote request, so you can easily reference the project requirements directly from the work order.

For simple or vendor-managed projects, the work order will be enough. For complex projects, you’ll want to explore Harmony’s project management features, which allow you to easily track an unlimited number of tasks with target dates, dependencies, time and bill tracking, and much more.

Maintenance in Harmony is simple and powerful. In fact, some managers use Harmony just for its impressive maintenance features. If you have ideas for how we can make your maintenance smoother, please drop us a line.