Buildium

"Buildium is Easy to Use- always"

Commentaires: I train multiple users of Buildium to use it, help fix issues as they occur. Buildium makes it very easy to do and explain. I use it everyday doing the books in full for several accounts. I never cringe when investigating accounts for other peoples' errors because Buildium is so clear.

Avantages: *Ease of use cannot be overstated
*Screen aren't overly "busy" and the fonts are easily read, layout is obvious
*Accuracy and flexibility to make all accounting coherent and easy to explain to brokers/owners
*Reports generate quickly and while viewable on the screen can zero in on specific transactions, with interactive links
*Ability to email individual reports or export in a variety of printing styles
*Bank reconciliation and tie-out cash to properties and owners and company is simple
*Communications have improved a lot in the past year - SMS tracking communication with tenants is much better.
* banking window is AWESOME Being able to select by property and dates... Wonderful!!

Inconvénients: *Reporting fails - prints two pages when unnecessary, waste of paper, most people want one pagers
- inability to email all owners their statements to each owner all at once. Can email individual reports only. Can't select properties on the fly- have to create a printing Group first.
*Email addresses in owner and tenant records still tried to jump outside of Buildium instead of taking you to a simplified email interface within for tracked communications.
Sometimes it's a little clunky navigating back and forth to common areas like between lease and property
*Inability to produce a Invoice to the owner for reimbursing the broker/property manager or other vendors as needed. Owner statement doesn't reflect bills for the property entered but not yet paid.

"Best accounting program for rental property income and expenditure "

Commentaires: With Buildium, all my income and expenditure information, receipts and invoices plus lease agreements etc are all stored in the one place. At tax time, printing out reports for my tax agent is simple and quick.

Avantages: Easy to use and can cope with multiple properties.
Reports can be generated for variations in financial year reporting of different counties.
You can set up recurring bills so they appear on your list of things to do which reminds you and you don't have to re-enter all the data each time you have a bill to pay.

Inconvénients: This is an American based program and for American users, it offers the ability to pay bills direct from your bank account etc. For me in Australia, this facility is unavailable.

"Great Software!!!"

Commentaires: We are able to get much better organized, be on top of things.

Avantages: It is a pure property management software. It has one thing in mind...managing real estate.

Inconvénients: The financial angle is not great. If you know the work arounds, it is OK. It also does not have a sales tax component like HST or GST in Canada.

Commentaires: We've been using Buildium for about 2 years, long enough to get a good feel for its strengths and weaknesses. My overall impression is that this is a good product for small to medium size residential property management firms (10-100 units). If you have fewer than 10, this product is overkill. If more than 100, you'll probably find it too simplistic. The product is geared to residential properties and residential associations. Managing commercial portfolios with it can be difficult. The Good:
Accounting functionality is pretty strong. GL, AR, AP, budgets and property ledgers are handled seamlessly. Very easy to use even for beginners. I like the global search functionality. You can pretty much find anything using it without navigating through the menus. Pricing is relatively inexpensive. It's cloud-based, so you don't have to maintain any software on your own computers. You can access it anywhere with a web browser. Some people see this as a negative, but we've not had any issues with Buildium being down unexpectedly. The scheduled maintenance times are generally late at night. Support is good if you're having problems with the standard functionality. In general I would say the support staff understands their product well. And you can get them on the phone to explain things. That's becoming less common with companies today. Document management is hit & miss. I love that I can post a PDF receipt for every expense right there in the ledger. However, documents at the property- or owner level are less helpful. It's just one big bucket per property or owner. Having a folder structure would be a big help. (Not there today.) Buildium offers tenant bill-pay through an online portal for rent payments, and also outbound electronic payments to property owners. It's done through a 3rd party vendor and at additional cost. This is a double-edged sword. Very convenient; it makes the bookkeeping entries for you automatically. But if you're doing outbound payments, make sure to treat it just like an online banking account (long passwords, be careful of who in your office has access to it, etc.) Allowing for extra security questions or letting users limit the IP addresses that have this outbound payment functionality would be helpful. The Bad:
As noted, you'll get frustrated if you're trying to use this for commercial properties. The designers make assumptions that you're doing residential. CRM functionality is practically non-existent. This is an accounting package. They do have some decent (and customizable) postal-mail templates and can do mail-merge so you can send notices to tenants and owners. But this does not extend to email. You'll need another product to do CRM and do double data entry between systems. There is no integration layer or API, so no chance of integrating this with your CRM system or generating custom reports. The reports, while nice-looking, are as-is and not customizable in any way. You're stuck with what they give you. They make some odd design decisions sometimes. For example, you can't generate an association owner invoice for an owner who lives someplace other than the managed property. The invoice is always addressed to the managed property, even if you entered a different mailing address for the owner, as if an association owner would never rent out the property. These types of oddities abound, and the product support folks will never acknowledge it as a problem. They'll tell you to fill out an enhancement request, which may be considered for implementation someday, or may not. You'll never know. Providing a way to customize reports or providing an API would help in this area. In Summary:
Buildium is good at what it does, but what it does is pretty limited. You will likely be happy if you're in their demographic sweet spot (10-100 residential units). It's cheap enough to sign up and try it out to see if it's right for you. If you manage commercial properties, have a very large or complex portfolio, or need integrated CRM capabilities, it's probably not for you.

"Customer Support Used To Be Good"

Commentaires: It's been fine so far but honestly, I've started to look at alternate solutions as I continue to grow my business.

Avantages: It's adequate software for the money; especially when you look at what you'd have to pay for the competition. Relatively easy to use.

Inconvénients: As I've read in at least one review, the customer support used to be top notch. Today, it's dismal. Do not get suckered into the callback option! They claim you won't lose your place in line. I find that hard to believe as it's been 5 days and I still haven't received a callback. Am I still holding my place in line?
Regarding financials / banking, if you're using more than 1 bank account for your company, you'll have to do much manual manipulation to essentially get the software to do what you want.
The support documentation is outdated and annoying. Annoying in the sense when you find the topic you need and start reading, there are links that take you away from the current page to explain other concepts you need to resolve your problem. Essentially, you start bouncing around the documentation and tend to lose your place and continuuity of what you were looking to accomplish. It's a bit frustrating.