As a property manager, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with transactions and interactions. Your role positions you between owners/investors, tenants/guests, and vendors – all the time. Each one has their own needs, and they’re relying on you to meet these needs.
Harmony has you covered with portals. Portals are the extension of your staff and office, the primary method that your people can use to interact and transact. HERO PM invented web portals for the property management industry over 25 years ago, and we have more experience than any other company. This is reflected in the power, simplicity, and functionality of portals.
There are a plethora of things that make Harmony Portals better than any other solution available – too many to list here! However, we’ll cover a few of the big ones, and let you see the rest in action.
- Harmony eliminates the burden and liability of managing portal login accounts, while still giving you incredibly granular control over portal content.
- Harmony provides the opportunity for a person to do everything they need through their portals, from esigning agreements to dealing with maintenance to making payments.
- Harmony gives your portal users control over viewing and organizing content in their portal, without it changing anything for the property manager.
- Harmony is the only solution that offers true, secure integration of portals with your website.
Portal Functions
Here’s a summary of the people you interact with, and some of the common things they can do through their portals. Again, you decide, for everyone or for each person, and for each item, what they can do (more on that below):
Tenants
- Review and esign their lease
- Pay rent, deposits, fees, and set up preapproved payments
- View charges due
- Submit and track work requests
- View email and text messages and phone conversations between them and their manager
- View agreements, documents, letters, violations, and notices, and esign notices as required
- View appointments and other events with their manager
Guests
- Review and esign their reservation
- View and pay reservation and optional fees, and taxes
- Check in and check out and receive access and wifi codes
- Add guests, insurance, and other options
- Submit work and cleaning requests
- View email and text messages and phone conversations between them and their manager
- View agreements, documents, letters, violations, and notices, and esign notices as required
Owners
- Review and esign their management agreement
- View reports and statements
- View balances and send money
- View new and changed items on their account
- View and approve invoices
- View and approve work orders
- View and approve applicants and bookers
- View occupants and occupant agreements
- View email and text messages and phone conversations between them and their manager
- View agreements, documents, letters, violations, and notices, and esign notices as required
Vendors
- View, accept, and track work orders
- View work order access authorizations and schedules
- Update and complete work orders, with estimates and totals
- Add photos and videos to work orders
- View the status of invoice payments correlated with work orders completed
- Track arrival, departure, and time on-site for work with job logging
- Communicate with the property manager
If you manage associations, options are even more extensive. Committee members are automatically authorized for portal actions based on their defined committee purpose. All members can interact with their community and reserve resources like the clubhouse, share social functions, view community events, and much more.
Portal Control
All of this is controlled by you, through multiple levels that allow you to make it easy, or make it precise, as your needs dictate.
- Global settings by portal type allow you to set default authorizations for all portals of a given type.
- Individual settings by portal user allow you to add or remove specific authorizations for one individual that differ from others.
- Item authorizations allow you to include or exclude a specific item. For example, you can include all documents saved for a tenant, except that one document where the attorney is telling you in legalese what your options are for a failure to cure.
- Additional options extend certain visibility and access. For example:
- You can authorize a specific owner’s document to be shared with all tenants of that owner, so every tenant in any of the owner’s properties see it.
- You can automatically turn off payments in all portals from the 10th of the month until the end of the month, but keep global/individual settings for all other times.
- You can make a specific work order wait for vendor acceptance, or wait for owner approval, while allowing other work orders to proceed without it. This is super handy when you require owner approval on work over a certain amount.
- You can make a specific invoice wait for owner approval. This is convenient if he asks you to use his cousin Vinny for the paint job, and the invoice comes in significantly over the estimate!
- In three decades of seeing every unique situation encountered in property management, if there’s a need, most likely Harmony has a solution.
Portal Integration
Harmony portals are unique in the way they integrate with your website. No other company in our industry provides this level of integration. Studies show that deep portal integration increases user engagement and satisfaction while reducing friction.
The technology behind this deep integration is quite complex, but for your users, it’s super smooth and simple. Rather than linking to an external portal, or framing a portal into your site, Harmony website portal integration makes the portal an integral part of your actual website. It conveys safety and professionalism, while creating a consistent experience for your portal users and reinforcing your brand.
If you don’t have a HERO Website, you can still use portals in standalone mode, just like what our competitors offer. However, you’ll find that integrated portals solve a lot of problems!
Loginless Portal Functions
Certain Harmony functions are available without requiring a login to a portal. In a nutshell, by including the function as a merge field in a CRM email, the user can go directly to the function – without logging in – and complete their task. Instead of a username/password, a secret and key are exchanged between Harmony and the function, giving the user a one-time digital fingerprint. This saves them from having to log in for common one-off functions. Some examples include:
- Paying a one-time or recurring charge
- Confirming an appointment for maintenance or another event
- Completing a survey after an interaction with the property management company or a vendor
- A vendor accepting, declining, or requesting rescheduling of work
- An owner approving or denying a work order
- An occupant reviewing and responding to a violation notice
- An occupant accepting an insurance quote/policy
- And more
We can’t advise you on what to do with all your free time, but we can give you solutions to create it! You’ll find that Harmony portals massively reduce emails, phone calls, confusion, delays, and time spent in the office. This is just one of the many ways that Harmony users are able to manage more than double the number of units per manager than the industry average – the system does so much of the work. More efficiency, more accuracy, less work, and happier owners and tenants. It’s your recipe for success!