Putting it on Autopilot

[Jerome Kaidor]

Hi all,

Recent events in my life have caused me to want to spend less time on the day to day administration of my properties. Simply - we just gave birth to twins. A boy and a girl.

I do all the backoffice work for my 81 units. Mostly paying bills, checking prospective tenants, handling phone calls from prospectives. OH, and let's not forget the bookkeeping.

I have started putting certain things on autopay - garbage bills, insurance premiums, phone bills. These are all pretty steady bills, that don't change much. I put them on my business credit card, and pay the thing off in full every month. That way, I don't have to worry about exactly when there's money in business checking. I try not to run excessive float. It's quicker to pay one bill than to pay 10.

I have NOT put the power bills on autopay, because that can be VERY variable, and if there's a nasty surprise, I'd like to hear about it up front instead of having money just sucked out of my account.

One of the accounts wanted a $1.47 "convenience" fee for the autopay. I ponied up without hesitation. The amount of "me" time spent organizing a bill and cutting a check is worth a lot more than $1.47.

On the bookkeeping front, I have written custom web software for the tenant ledgers, and have pushed that task down to the onsite staff. That is saving me a lot of time, and they are doing a better job of it than I ever did.

One time consuming chore is doing the payroll. I elaborately divvy every dime into the Schedule E categories - repairs, maintenance, cleaning etc etc. My software generates work orders with unique numbers, staff fills them out with their hours, and what they did, and then they fax me a pile of the things and I enter everthing into the database. For tasks that are not "interesting" from a property improvement point of view, like daily sweeping of the premises, cleaning the laundry room, doing management tasks - I use timesheets. Once it's all faxed in, I enter all the workorders into my web database, and slice and dice it all with a combination of Quicken, spreadsheets, and Surepayroll. Gotta be a way I can get people to enter their own workorders and timesheets.

I may be putting too much precision into my tracking. Who really cares whether Bob's 20 hours are maintenance or repair? Not the IRS, I think. I could assign ALL of bob's hours to repair, and all of Judy's to cleaning. Save a lot of time that way. Nahhh... I'm way too OCD to get that sloppy.

One thing I probably cannot sluff off without hiring and training someone specific - is the marketing of apartments and checking out prospective tenants. Both of these are absolutely vital to my operation, and if somebody screws it up, I'm toast.

I am completing a module that will allow me to send letters to the tenants with very little work. A web form to type in the from address, to address, salutation ( all of this filled in with sensible defaults ) and body of the letter - which is fed to a program that converts it into a language called "Latex" ( a typesetting system invented by Donald Knuth for doing beautiful math books ), and a utility converts it into a PDF that gets sent to the complex. To make it even easier, I am investigating a service called postalmethods.com: these guys provide a web API that will print your letter, slap it into an envelope, and physically mail it from Texas. It costs about a buck a letter, including postage.

- JerryK