What Management Software to Use

[Jared Pfaff]

Hello, We currently manage 32 units, houses and apartments. We will be taking on 240 new self storage units in the next two months. We are looking to upgrade from excel spread sheets to a management software where we can have our tenants pay online, accept maintenance requests, and they can see all their financial information. Is there a software that would be good for apartments and self storage or should we look at two induvial software systems? I was looking at Tenant Cloud for the apartments but It looks like people may uses storage management software separate for self storage. Any Suggestions are appreciated! 

[Wendy Carpenter]

@Zach Quick , to name a few things: the “automated” software not adding the monthly charges it’s supposed to for late payments and such (and when we called about it, we were literally told in writing [to paraphrase] “too bad, be thankful for what you get,” you can imagine that did not go over well with me), the system double charging people’s cards, and then not even issuing a credit on the account or in any way alerting us (the only way we found out was one customer saw it on their credit card and called us). They told us that some of the charging of cards and automated fees and payments are slow now because they have more customers and haven’t bought the bandwidth to keep up. Ummm my response is: then buy it. You’re a company who provides a service based on that?!

We’re on our third card processor with them because the first one kept putting the wrong name on people’s credit statements, which rightfully caused a lot of chargebacks, then outsourced their call center, and we could never get anyone to fix the chargeback problem (ESS nonchalantly said “oh yeah we’ve been having a lot of complaints about them.” So then we went to another company who apparently wanted me to lie about the PCI compliance forms (yes, they actually said to me “well, we’re not supposed to fill out that form for you, but we do because we know the tech speak is above most people’s heads, but now that they know we were going to fill it out, this is a problem,” but didn’t tell me they wanted me to lie, so then they got mad at me, and stopped doing half of what we paid them for when we bought another facility and tried to add it to the card processing (it’s a convoluted weird story). It baffled me. I wasn’t about to fill out the 500 question PCI compliance form because I did not understand 75% of the questions, and if I filled out an answer wrong because I was guessing, then if something happened with a hacker or security breach, we could be held responsible based on our not understanding the questions. ESS told us to “just do our best,” and that was a collective big fat NO. 

Then we switched to their system they just started doing in-house, and just a few days ago, they emailed us saying “whoopsie daisy, we accidentally deleted the saved autopay information for some of your tenants,” and apparently that happened to most of the facilities using them.

I just wrote this off the top of my head, so it’s scratching the surface. The people who answer the phones at ESS when you call for help have always been nice, they have just seemed to be getting very disorganized more and more over the last 6 months or so and I feel like they need to regroup and get their act together.