Managing Maintenance Charges

[Michael Sellers]

I am looking for a way to optimize the way I handle property maintenance expenses and am hoping someone has been more creative than me and already solved my current issue. Any advice/ideas are appreciated.

Current Set Up: I have a very lean team with ~50+ units under management across 15 buildings, each owned by a different LLC. I am the property manager and I have one handyman/maintenance guy who is able to handle 90%+ of our maintenance requests. As such, he and I both have a credit card associated with the property owner's account. At the end of each month, I reconcile all of the charges made on our two cards to show the owner which property incurred which expenses. At that point, the property owner pays off the credit card using the master property management account before reimbursing the property management account from each individual LLC account that incurred the charges that month. We have never had an issue with the current set up, it just does not seem very efficient especially as we continue to scale.

Solution (?): The best solution I've found to reduce redundancy would be to stop using the credit card and use separate debit cards for each LLC/property. This way, there is no reconciliation necessary, and the accounts incurring the charges are directly debited accordingly. However, this has its own inefficiencies. Namely, I would have to carry around 15 separate debit cards (as would my handyman), a number which would only increase as we scale. There is also the risk of using the wrong card on accident which is not possible under the current set up. I could personally use Apple Pay if I didn't want to carry around the physical cards, but our maintenance guy is not the most tech-savvy, and not all places are guaranteed to take Apply Pay, so that's not a perfect workaround, either.