Getting Started: Rental Properties
Being world-class at cost-effective cleaning and maintenance operations is very hard for property managers. Our goal is to help you get there.
Our goal is to help you save a significant amount of time and streamline your workflows. We aim to achieve this through a comprehensive onboarding process that spans 9 weeks. Here's how it works:
- Understanding Your Needs: We'll start by learning about your specific goals, workflows, and pain points. This allows us to tailor our solution to your unique requirements.
- Gradual Automation: Over the course of 9 weeks, we will progressively automate and optimize your workflows. This iterative approach ensures that we capture all the nuances of your processes.
- Collaborative Effort: While we will handle most of the initial setup work, your regular feedback is crucial for success. We encourage you to share what's working, what needs improvement, and any additional tasks that consume your time.
- Ongoing Refinement: Throughout the 9 weeks, we will continuously refine and adapt our solution based on your feedback and any new workflows that come to light.
- Measurable Results: Our aim is to save you up to 90% of your time on ongoing tasks by the end of the 9-week period.
Here's an example of what the 9-week onboarding timeline might look like:
- Onboarding Call: We gather information about your current time expenditure and key pain points.
- Go Live: We ensure a smooth transition with minimal disruptions to your operations.
- Week 1: We target an initial 10% time savings by streamlining essential workflows, such as pro scheduling.
- Weeks 2-3: We continue to refine the scheduling process and address any emerging workflow changes.
- Weeks 4-9: The specific focus during these weeks will vary based on your unique needs and priorities. Some examples of what we might work on include:
- Automating inventory restocking processes
- Setting up preventative maintenance planning
- Streamlining inbound emergency maintenance request workflows
- Fine-tuning accounting and billing workflows
- Addressing edge cases and optimizing job-related processes
- Ongoing Support: By the end of the 9 weeks, you should experience a 90% reduction in time spent on routine tasks. We continue to provide support and handle any ad-hoc requirements that arise.
To ensure a successful onboarding experience, we recommend setting up a standing weekly call during the 9-week period. This allows us to stay aligned, gather your valuable feedback, and make necessary adjustments promptly.
At the end of the onboarding process, we hope you'll be thrilled with the results and willing to share your success story through a case study or a glowing review.
The long part of the setup is not the software! The hard part is:
- Getting real world pros to follow your workflows. For example getting a pro you have used for years to take before and after photos can take a lot of reminding.
- Refining workflows. Nobody gets their workflows right upfront. As you go, you learn new things, exceptions to rules, etc.
This is why software alone is not enough, you need our team to help you with this process!
During this process, you will interact with these main teams from TIDY. Our Onboarding Team is responsible for making sure you move through this initial process, our Success Team is dedicated to your long-term happiness, and our Concierge Team is available for support requests and on-demand assistance.
On this call, we will collect some information, things that are particularly important are marked with a star.
The Most Important Keys to Initial Success
Of all the things here, the most important keys to success are:
- Set up communication channels with our team. We should act like an extension of your team!
- Add in all existing pros you have. Even if you want to move away from those pros, we recommend doing this gradually to minimize disruptions.
- Schedule typical jobs for the initial test cases. Normal jobs for most people are booked further out, are a bit flexible on days/times, have no particular compliance requirements, & have a high enough price to attract pros.
Here is a summary of the initial information we typically need to get started:
Most Important:
- What is your property management system, or what is your list of properties?
- Do you have a target price you wish to pay for jobs? Max prices?
- Target prices are used to give guidance on when we should continue to work with a vendor. These are optional, but if you give us a target price, we will notify pros who work with you above that rate that they are above your target and continue to look for and prefer vendors at or below your target.
- Max prices means the max you would want to pay for a job ever, at which point it is better to fail. For example, a cleaning that might be $150 normally, you may wish to never occur if it is above $500 (unless you explicilty approve).
- What is your existing vendor information? We need this to automate with them.
- What checklists do you have for inspections, maintenance, or cleaning?
Other Items:
- If you want to set up inventory tracking, we need a list of items on the property.
- If you want to set up preventative maintenance suggestions, what assets do you have and do you have any existing maintenance schedules for them?
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.
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?
- 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.
- 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.
- Set up your branding, and all users on your account will see your company branding on the various pages.
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
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
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 coverage.
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 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.
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.
- Note: There is no way for us to work on compliance requirements on a trial basis. This can only be done as a part of a full subscription.
- 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 a Map. Create a fun map of your property to share with your pros.
Learn more: Property Maps
What items do you want to track in inventory?
Learn more: Inventory Tracking
Do you have any checklists that you currently use?
If not, do you have any preferences you want in your list?
Are your lists general, or specific per-property? Are they tied into inventory tracking
Set Default List (Cleaning list, Inspection list, etc)
Enable Remote Inspection (Photos or/and videos before or/and after the cleaning)
Learn more: To-Dos Lists
For most properties, we want to make sure there is access notes for each property, when possible. Ideally including codes, a photo, parking, closing instructions.
If using smartlocks, 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).
- 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. For this we need:
- Check in-check outs
- Type of job you want to book
IT IS IMPORTANT TO SET UP REALISTIC TESTS
If you are running tests to see if TIDY is right for you, it is very important that you try to test on typical workflows. These are real-world pros who typically need We recommend booking:
- Most jobs at least 1 week in advance
- Avoiding holiday bookings when possible
For jobs that must be done on a holiday or at the last minute, we recommend being prepared to increase the price to ensure it can get done. Talk with our team to get feedback on the probability of acceptance or other information. We are here to help!
The probability of a job request getting accepted is affected dramatically by the property and your settings. These are some of the factors:
Less Likely To Accept | More Likely To Accept |
|---|---|
Last Minute Jobs | Jobs >1 week out |
Low-Cost Jobs | Higher-Rate Jobs |
Lots of Compliance Requirements (e.g. gender preferences) | Little Compliance Requirements |
Single-Day Request (no flexibility) | Multi-Day Request (some flexibility) |
Remote Location | Busy Location |
Sundays and Holidays | Weekdays |
High Dispute Activity on Your Account | Low Dispute Activity on Your Account |
High Cancellation Rate on Your Account | Low Cancellation Rate on Your Account |
So for example, making a job request for Christmas day on Christmas Eve with gender preferences in a remote location at a low rate will have an extremely low probability of acceptance. Making a job request for something over a couple of days, with reasonable rates and at least some notice, will have a high acceptance rate.
By default, we always prefer the earliest time in your timeslot, this is important for faster turnovers.
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.
There are a few things you can set up:
- Pay in advance for jobs where TIDY finds you a new pro. If you are not using TIDY to find new pros, we recommend disabling this, and paying after. This will avoid any possibility of billing confusion. If this is enabled, when a job request is made, we will load credit to cover the cost of the job booked. This helps us you get better pricing.
- Autopay settings. For pros you add, you can set up "Autopay", which means you will automatically pay by credit card any invoice they send you. You can disable this if you prefer to manually review invoices.
- Team Billing. By adding properties to a team, you can isolate the billing for a group of properties. This is great if you want customers to pay for their cleanings on a separate card but not have that card used for other things.
- Bill notes. You may want to use bill notes to tag or add information about bills, automatically or manually.
- Concierge Billing/Payables. You can set up advanced billing/payable rules to follow almost anything you like by working with our concierge. It is normal for customers to want different setups, and our concierge can set these up on our backend. For example, you can set thresholds for given combinations of properties, vendors, and amounts (like automatically approving Bob Smith's bills for up to $100 at 1 Main st or requiring invoices to have certain notes.).
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
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).