Getting Started: Rental Properties
TIDY helps you take control of the cleaning and maintenance of your rental properties. This is very challenging work, and TIDY gives you the tools to be successful. We recommend reaching out to our team, who can help set you up for success at no additional cost. However, that is not necessary, and we will outline our full checklist of how we recommend setting up here in our documentation.
While you do not need to do every step here, these are the recommended steps we walk through with our success team to ensure we understand all your requirements. Does it seem like a lot? That is because running cleaning and maintenance at your properties is very hard, and to do it right requires tailoring it to your needs. Don't worry, not all of these steps are necessary and our team can help.
⭐ How Do You Want to Communicate With Us
At TIDY, we work for you so we will try our best to be available to your administrators in the way that works best for you. Slack is often best.
⭐ Share Your Goals
At TIDY, we want to be your partner for all things related to cleaning and maintenance technology. So we want to hear your goals. We have success team who tracks this, and does what it takes to make sure you achieve your goals and show success on the metrics you choose.
What are you looking to accomplish?
What metrics or reports are important to you?
⭐ Share Tools & Schedule Technical Review
- If you have your own system involved in properties, it is likely you will want to integrate into it in some way.
- Talk to our technical team for a review on how we can accomplish this.
⭐ Integrate any PMS System or Add Your Properties
- If you are using a PMS system for your properties, we generally recommend using that as the source of truth for your properties, and syncing them into TIDY. Learn more about different property management integrations.
- You can also add addresses in manually. Learn more: Properties/Addresses .
Set Up Your Branding
- Set up your branding, and all users on your account will see your company branding on the various pages.
Learn more about setting custom branding.
Organize your properties into teams
Teams are ways to group properties together for various purposes:
- Teams are a way to group addresses and users in a way that match your organization.
- They can be nested within each other, to best reflect your business structure.
- Generally speaking, a team's settings will override the account settings OR their parent team's settings. This allows you to create powerful rules, with nested defaults.
- When a user is added to one or more team, they can only see the addresses in the teams they are on (or sub-teams). It is a way to limit user's access to only see certain addresses and information.
- You can define payment rules for specific teams, for example you can set a default card for team 1, and a different default credit card for team 2. If you leave this null, it will take the parent's card information.
- You can run reports by team, to know what happened for that team (like total spent). This can be useful for example if you have certain things that must be grouped together for accounting.
- The accounting integration can use the team to push data into Quickbooks or other sources.
Learn more: Teams
Add users to your teams
People typically have a few types of users: internal (such as employees of your company), partners/customers (such as property owners), or guests/residents (temporary visitors to the property).
- There are no per-user fees, so we recommend adding as many people as you like.
- You can add users to teams to limit their access.
- For guest/resident logins, we typically recommend a deeper integration including using SSO (single sign on) to create the accounts, this can be easier to manage.
- We can generally can support most types of permissions, but these may need to be set up in our backend, and require discussions.
Getting Started Checklist:
Add any admin users
Add any limited users through the UI
Add any guest/resident type users through SSO
Learn more: Users
⭐ Add all existing pros/vendors
TIDY works best when it has all of your vendors and jobs. Don't worry, there is no fee to use us with your own vendors, and we don't affect any of your existing pricing. It is just a tool to manage everything in 1 spot.
We Strongly Recommend Adding Many Pros/Vendors
We know the industry well, the only way to have reliability is to have redundancy. We recommend adding at least 3 pros or vendors that can serve each property to ensure adequate
Example: Charlie’s Property Management Company.
Before TIDY: Charlie manages 4 properties he lists on AirBnb. Every time between bookings, he has to call up one of the 2 vendors he uses for a job: Ann and Barbara. He leaves voicemails for each of them, and they call him back later to confirm an appointment time. About 25% of the time, they don’t show up at all. Tracking their progress requests lots of texts and calls. Charlie decides to use TIDY.
After TIDY: Charlie adds his 4 addresses to TIDY. Then he connects his AirBnb account, adds his 2 existing vendors (Ann and Barbara) and occasionally uses other Pros that he finds on TIDY as a backup in case they can’t make it. He adds a To-Do list to show each person exactly what to do.
Now when a guest reserves his AirBnb, TIDY automatically checks if a job is needed. It send's Charlie's request automatically to Ann or Barbara first. Ann accepts by tapping in her app, and the booking is all set. She uses TIDY to track her work, so Charlie knows what is going on.
⭐ Track your assets and set up maintenance suggestions
- Track your assets by adding them to your properties in the "Addresses" sections.
- If you already have maintenance schedules that you want to load, send them to us and we can load these for you.
- If you don't have these, or want our suggestions from our AI, we can set these up for you as well. We can help provide maintenance suggestions based on what other clients do and what experts say. These appear in the "Concierge" section, as well as on the addresses themselves, and in reports.
If you let us know existing cleaning/maintenance plans you have on each property, so we can set up maintenance suggestions.
There are basically 2 ways to set up things in the sytem. You can set up regular plans (jobs you actually have scheduled on a regular basis) or you can set up suggestions, if you just want reminder to set things up.
Specify your compliance requirements for vendors.
TIDY will make sure all your vendors meet your compliance requirements.
We can track both your compliance requirements, and your pro's compliance with these requirements. These typically involve things like:
- Insurance requirements
- Training requirements
- Licensing requirements
- Agreement requirements (for example NDAs)
We can support almost any requirement you come up with. Here is what we do with the information:
- On your behalf, we reach out to the vendors on a regular basis to ensure their compliance. For example, in the case of insurance, we would request a COI from them. As we track these items, we will add it to their profile on your account, so you can ensure that people meet these requirements.
- As we help you find new vendors, we will ensure they meet your compliance requirements.
- It is important to note that adding compliance requirements typically adds costs to your jobs AND reduces the pool of available pros. For example, if you require $1M in insurance from all vendors, many will not meet this requirement. As an alternative, in some cases, you may wish to insure yourself against risks from pros/vendors.
⭐ Set up your shared inbox the way you want.
- Tell us how you want to set up alerts to get notified of events in the system. Events can be seen in the "Notifications" or "Webhooks" section of the app. We can send events to email, sms, slack, MS Teams, webhook, or other tool. Just let us know where you want things.
- Conversations in TIDY are grouped by job or by pro. You can look at the full conversation thread on either a job or with a pro. This is a shared inbox, that allows everyone to see the full conversation thread of the job.
Create maps.
- Create a Map. Create a fun map of your property to share with your pros.
Learn more: Property Maps
⭐ Create to-do lists/checklists for your vendors to follow.
Do you have any checklists that you currently use?
If not, do you have any preferences you want in your list?
Learn more: To-Do Lists
Set up smart lock integration.
Right now, anyone can use RemoteLock to integrate their smartlocks.
If you have only 1 kind of smart lock across all your properties, we can also integrate with that separately outside of RemoteLock. (Min 20 locks of the same type).
Learn more about smart locks.
⭐ Start scheduling jobs with vendors to solve your tasks.
- We can help contact your vendors and make sure they are set up.
- Set up Automatic Booking. Connect all your accounts from booking channels (like AirBnb, VRBO) or your property management system (like Hostaway, Guesty) to automatically sync your calendar with TIDY.
Set up your account payable rules.
- You do not have to use our payables system, but vendors can invoice you after jobs. You can track everything that is owed, and pay invoices as you go.
Set up accounting integration.
Note: This is only available to enterprise customers at this time.
- We can push data into your accounting system, such as QuickBooks.
- To set this up, we need to do a specific call to understand how you want these mapped into your quickbooks. Then, our technical team will make sure it is all configured correctly.
- Note it can take about 30 days to set up the integration.
Learn More: Accounting
Set up smart thermostat integration (beta).
Note: This is only available to enterprise customers at this time.
If you have only 1 kind of smart thermostat across all your properties. (Min 20 thermostats of the same type).
