ElectricalBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

Property Manager Electrical Accounts: One Client, Dozens of Addresses, One Place to Find Them

A property manager is the kind of customer who can keep a van busy. They manage rentals, buildings and suites for owners who expect things fixed, and they would much rather call one electrician they trust than shop around every time a breaker trips. The catch is that a manager with dozens of addresses can turn your customer list into a mess if your software only knows how to think one house at a time.

Why the Usual Setup Falls Apart

The big picture of commercial work is laid out in Commercial Electrical Software: The Complete Guide to Property Manager, Retail and Office Accounts. This article zooms in on the very first decision: how you set up the manager in the first place.

Many shops start by creating a new customer for every address. “ABC Properties — Elm St,” “ABC Properties — Oak Ave,” and so on. It works for the first three. By the twentieth, nobody can find anything, the manager's phone number has been typed in twenty different ways, and when the manager asks what you did for them last month, someone has to dig through twenty separate records to answer.

One Client With Many Addresses

ElectricalBossPro handles this the way the manager thinks about it. The management company is one client. Each property they send you is an address under that client. The client holds the things that are true for the whole account: the company name, the contacts, the billing settings, tags and custom fields. Each address holds the things that are true for that one location.

When the manager calls, the office opens the client and sees every address in one list. When a tech is dispatched, the job is tied to both the client and the specific address, so the work history builds up in the right place.

What Each Address Keeps

Every address under a commercial client has its own record. That record carries:

• Access notes. Where the key is, which door to use, who to ask for, what hours work is allowed.
• Equipment. Main panel, subpanels, meter base, exterior disconnect and anything else on site, with brand, model, serial, rating, phase and location.
• Measurements. Square feet, fixtures and circuits, which your services can be priced from.
• Job history. Every visit, with the tech's notes and photos.
• Recurring plans. A relamping visit every 30 days at one building and a yearly inspection at another.

That separation matters. The fixture count at the leasing office has nothing to do with the panel in the duplex across town, and keeping them on separate addresses means neither one gets lost.

Bringing In the Manager's List

Managers usually have a list of their properties already, often as a spreadsheet. Rather than typing each one in, you can bring the list in with CSV import, and the imported addresses are placed on the map automatically. From there the office fills in access notes and equipment as the techs learn each building. The import step is covered in Importing a Property Manager's Address List: CSV Import for Commercial Electricians.

Once the addresses are on the map, every one of them shows up on the Waiting List and the dispatch board in the right place, so the office can see at a glance which of the manager's properties are near today's other calls.

Billing Once for the Whole Account

Because the addresses all sit under one client, billing can be set once. Set the client to Monthly and every job across every address rolls onto one statement at the end of the month, with each line labeled by the address. The manager's accounting office gets one document instead of a stack, and they can still tell exactly which property each charge belongs to.

If a manager prefers to pay per job, that works too. The billing setting is on the client, so you can match each account to the way they actually pay.

Contacts and Communication

A management company often has more than one person you deal with: the manager who approves work, a maintenance lead who meets your tech, and an accounts payable contact who handles the statement. Writing down who is who on the client record, in the notes or in a custom field, means the office always knows who to text about scheduling and who gets the bill. Two-way texting runs from the office, and automatic on-the-way and arrived alerts can go out as the tech heads to each property.

Starting the Account Right

The time to set up a property manager properly is before the tenth address, not after. One client, one address per property, access and equipment on each address, billing set once. If you want to see how this fits with relamping routes, inspection reports and monthly statements, head back to the commercial electrical software overview.