Let's look at managing property maintenance with Harmony.

There are a ton of optional components in maintenance, and maintenance is designed to be pretty flexible. 

Every property manager is going to manage maintenance a little differently.

We'll give a broad overview, and you can take it from there!

In simple terms, maintenance starts with a request. 

The request tells you that something needs to be done.

The request is reviewed by the property manager or maintenance manager, who then creates an order. 

The order is an instruction to a vendor to perform work.

The vendor performs the work, and then submits an invoice. The invoice is the demand for the responsible party, typically the unit or property owner, to pay for the work.

Harmony handles all of this, and the individual variations, exceptions, delays, components, and communications that happen along the way.

Let's start with the request.

In Harmony, a work request is not required, but is advantageous.

A work request allows you to easily keep the requestor in the loop, including resolution notices, appointment confirmations, access permissions, and more. 

It also gives you the ability to group multiple work orders together, when multiple vendors, visits, or projects are required to complete work.

You can skip a request and go straight to a work order, but you'll find the request makes your life easier.

There are four common sources for a request:

An occupant submitting a request through their portal.

An occupant or owner contacting you by phone, text, email, or a visit to your office, with a report of their problem.

Automatically scheduled routine maintenance on a unit.

A problem area discovered in an inspection.

We'll cover inspections separately, for now let's look at the first three.

Each occupant has a portal account, and that's where they'll normally go to pay rent, review their statement, sign their lease, and a ton of other things. This is all covered elsewhere.

When you enable Maintenance in an occupant's portal, they can submit maintenance requests and track their resolution.

In their portal, they'll select Maintenance, then Submit a Work Request, then complete the work request.

There are advantages to directing occupants to submit their requests through the portal, including:

It prompts them to select all relevant options, including whether unit has animals, the vendor has permission to enter, and if this is a repeat problem.
It requires them to confirm or add their current contact information, giving you the chance to update your records.
When you use the maintenance after hours scheduling, it allows you to direct the request to a third-party when you're not in the office.
If their occupant agreement includes add-ons related to maintenance, it allows for third-party provisioning. For example, if a tenant requests pest control and has a pest control add-on in their lease, the request can be copied to the pest control provider. Or if a tenant requests filter replacement and they have a filter replacement add-on in their lease, the request can trigger filter delivery.

If you allow work requests by email, text, phone, or in person, the process is similar.

Instead of the requester completing the request in their portal, you'll complete the request in Harmony.

Select the person making the request. Then select Maintenance, and Add Work Request.

You can make this request visible in their portal for the requester to track, and add any special notes from the requester.

Just like in the portal, you can add videos, photos, or other documents and files related to the work to be done.

When you're done, select Save Request.

The third way you'll normally get work requests is through scheduled routine maintenance.

Select a unit, then select maintenance.

Edit the maintenance view.

In this example, we'll say this unit is subject to mandatory inspection and service on the smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detector.

Enter the items subject to routine maintenance, their location in the unit, the last check or service, and the service interval.

When you're done, select Save Maintenance.

By default, a new work request will automatically be created a week before the routine maintenance is due. If you want to adjust this timeframe, there's a setting called, "Number of days in advance to create work requests on routine maintenance due" that you can edit to your desired advance notice.

When you complete the routine maintenance, the service intervals automatically increment.

As we mentioned, we won't cover the next method of work requests, inspections, here. They're pretty deep and powerful, and covered in other resources.

You now have a work request, so the next obvious step is to review the work request and create a work order.

However, since we're already looking at the unit maintenance view, let's first cover a few items in unit configuration that can affect work order creation and assignment.

The info/instructions section allows us to set standard instructions for the people who may be involved in maintenance issues, including the property manager, occupant, vendor, and others depending on property type. When we add instructions, the correct people will see this information before any work is performed.

The service providers section has two parts.

First we see any services agreement on the unit. A services agreement is covered in more detail elsewhere, but here it shows us that this vendor should be preferred when assigning any work orders on this unit. Typically services agreements are used for home warranties, or when you have an in-house person triaging all work for a set of units before it's passed off to any trades.

Next is the record of what company provides services and utilities on this unit. This can include the provider name, contact information, and account numbers as necessary. This information can be relevant, and is displayed, when creating work orders.

The following section allows you to assign preferred vendors for specific types of work on the unit. When you have a preferred vendor and create a work order for the work they cover, the work order will advise you to assign it to them. You can still override this, and we'll get into vendor suitability a little later on.

Next is access, where you can indicate any codes or other information required to access the unit for maintenance. From here, you can also register keys.

Harmony's key log system helps you track keys and other access devices or access codes for a unit. In this list, you'll see all registered keys, which ones are out to vendors, which ones are in the possession of the owner or occupant, and which ones are in the property manager's key storage system.

Key logs work for physical items, like metal keys, key cards, or key fobs, and virtual items like fixed or rotating access codes. If you use smart locks, this may be integrated with your lock provider to generate and track codes and authorize connections.

To register a new key manually, select the Add button.

Enter all the information about the key, including the coded location where the key "lives", that is, where it's stored when it's in the property manager's possession. This tells you where to grab it from when you issue it to a vendor, and where to put it when the vendor returns it.

When you're done, select Add Key.

You now have a registered key, which you can issue to a vendor when a work order is assigned to them.

In the next section, we previously addressed routine maintenance, but skipped over appliances and equipment.

When a unit has maintainable appliances or equipment, enter the items here. If they are under warranty, enter the warranty information. When you create a work order for this item, Harmony will show you if it's in warranty, with the information for warranty service that you enter.

Unit equipment tracking is also useful for items like issued waste recepticles. When the neighbor nabs this unit's trash bin from the street, you can reference the ID number and nab it back.

Below this you'll see the maintenance history for this unit. This includes any currently open maintenance, as well as completed maintenance. You can also add new maintenance from here, instead of from a person.

Last, you'll see a history of inspections and inspection reports on this unit.

Now that we've seen the unit maintenance options, let's get back to the work request.

When you get a new work request, you'll be notified in a number of ways.

When the work request comes from portals or the API, your maintenance contact receives an email, and optionally, a text message. 

Earlier we mentioned that this notification email can go to a third-party during your after hours schedule. We'll cover that in just a moment.

When the work request is not directly entered by you in Harmony, you'll also see a notification in your updates and alerts, including who the request is from, and what time it was submitted.

For all new work requests, regardless of their source, you'll see them in your alert icons and your action boxes.

Most of the time, you'll look at all action boxes aggregated on your dashboard. However, you can also see exclusively maintenance related action boxes, from your maintenance view.

As with everything in Harmony, there are many ways to see and process information. You may settle into one specific place to look, and one regular sequence to process things, but all the different ways work. After understanding them all, just pick what works for you.

For example, some managers will never look at work request notification emails, updates, alerts, or actions -  they just review their maintenance list constantly and deal with stuff as it shows up. This is perfectly valid, if that's how you want to handle it.

Let's assume work request notifications by email and text are important to you. For this, you'll want to make sure your maintenance contacts are set up correctly.

It's important to understand how agent contacts and company contacts work in Harmony. This is covered in more detail in other resources, but we'll cover it briefly here.

When an action happens on a place or a person, its managing agent receives the notifications. however, Each managing agent can designate that notifications should go to the company instead of themselves. 

Note that a managing agent is not necessarily an individual, it can be a team with a division of responsibility. Harmony's flexibility allows for all of these scenarios elegantly.

Let's take a complex example, just to cover it. Your situation will probably be much simpler, but for this demonstration, we'll show you how flexible your notifications are.

In this example, your company has an agent named John Doe, who oversees a portfolio of two hundred and fifty of your managed units. You have three other agents, each one manages two hundred and fifty units.

In your company, you have two maintenance managers, who each oversee 500 units. 

Gladys oversees John's 250, and also Jim's 250. In this case, both John and Jim would set their agent account to have Gladys as their maintenance contact. When a new work request arrives on any of John or Jim's units, Gladys is notified.

Your office hours are Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm. After hours, John wants Annabelle's Answering Service to receive and review all incoming maintenance requests. In John's contacts, he sets Annabelle as his after hours contact.

Jim, on the other hand, wants to personally handle maintenance requests on his properties, even after hours. In Jim's contacts, he sets himself as the after hours contact.

To activate the after hours schedule, you must set it up. 

Go to Settings, Maintenance, After-Hours Schedule and establish the hours during which your workday starts and ends. Any work requests received outside of this time will be directed to the after-hours contact, using the configured maintenance contact of the agent who manages the unit requiring maintenance.

Note that you can set your after-hours schedule to Vacation mode to make everything go to the after hours contact. You can also clear your after-hours schedule to do the opposite, and make everything go to the regular maintenance contact, no matter what time they are submitted.

Let's head over to your maintenance list and take a look at all unprocessed work requests.

We'll cover maintenance lists in more detail shortly, for now we'll focus on a single request.

At the top of your list, you'll see everything that's waiting for you to do something. In the case of work requests, you have two options.

You can resolve a work request with no work, or you can create a work order to assign work.

Let's imagine you get a work request from a tenant who just moved into their new house. They submit a work request saying their ice maker is not making ice. 

You don't need to dispatch and pay a vendor, you just need to instruct the tenant to flip the lever on the ice maker, since you shut off the ice makers on all vacant houses. Call the tenant, give them instructions, and mark the work request resolved.

In this case, we're going to be sure we log the conversation with the tenant. In the options drop down, select Log a Conversation.

If your phone system is integrated, click or tap the phone icon to dial. Otherwise, pick up your phone, dial, and make a note of the conversation.

Save the conversation, then select Mark Resolved, in the work request.

In the notification options, both the occupant and the account are greyed out, because we've configured our message templates to be optional for each work request. Working with templates is covered in detail in other resources.

In this case, you want the tenant to receive an email record that you've resolved this issue for them, so select their notification button, then save the work request.

Note that even if you didn't notify the tenant, they can still see the resolved work request in their portal, along with any notes you added.

In another scenario, the tenant who just moved in submitted a work request saying their fridge is not cold, it's not making any noise, and the light doesn't turn on when they open the door. In this case, something has to be done, so you're going to create a work order.

Edit this work request, then select Add Work Order.

In this case, you get a notice that the unit has a services agreement. You can assign the work to this vendor, or you can skip and assign to someone else. Let's skip this, because in this case, you want to take a look at the fridge yourself for this new tenant - just in case someone forgot to flip a breaker or plug it in during the vacancy.

You also see that this appliance work order has an appliance that is under warranty. That'll be good to know, if you actually end up needing service on the fridge.

For a typical work order, the next predicted actions are available as action buttons, which prompt and set dates, stages, and other relevant elements. However, you can also manually set these items to override the default actions.

Select the help tip for the stage for an understanding of what each stage means and does.

The stages control what can be done next, including what actions an owner, association, or vendor can take in their portal.

While you'll likely find the stage names to be intuitive, if you're new to a CMMS (computerized maintenance management system), it may take some time to get used to them.

We'll highlight a few of the stages here, focusing on the ones where we get the most questions.

Client Approval Pending means you must get the approval of the property owner or association before proceeding. For rentals, this is typically based on your management agreement and its authorizations and limits. You can see the relevant components of the management agreement further down, in the money section.

When a work order is in this stage, there are a few ways you can get client approval.

If verbal approval is sufficient, you can contact the owner directly, and manually adjust the stage when you receive approval.

Otherwise, you can select the notification option for the owner, to send them an email or text notification of the pending work order. 

If you have the logg-inless approval link in your template message, the owner can click the link in their email or text message to review and approve the work with their digital fingerprint. You can learn more about this in resources covering system message templates.

If you have owner portal authorization for this work order, when they log in to their portal, they'll see that they have a work order awaiting approval. They can review and approve it from there.

Note that if you want to provide all work orders and work requests in portals, you can turn this on in Settings, Portals, Preferences, By default, provide new work requests and work orders with portal access. Portals are covered in extensive detail in other resources.

When the owner approves, rejects, or requests a change, you'll get a notification and the work order stage will change automatically.

A similar option exists for vendors, when you want to give them the opportunity to accept or decline the work.

Again, you'll notify the vendor, and follow the same process as you did for the owner. Just like owners, the vendor can accept or decline from a logg-inless link in their notification template, or log in to their portal and review, then accept or decline the work.

When the vendor takes an action, the work order stage will automatically progress.

Another stage worthy of explanation is the Hold stage. After starting work, there may be conditions that require you to put it on hold. In such a case, you'll be prompted to enter a hold until date, and alerted if the conditions have not been resolved by the deadline.

There are two different stages that can indicate the work order is finished.

The Completed stage is most common. This means the vendor performed the work as outlined in the work order, and you should expect to get an invoice for it.

There are cases where completed work is not invoiced. These are most commonly issues like a vendor returning to fix something you already paid them for, but they flubbed, or a vendor directly billing an insurance company for work. In these cases, you'll still use the completed stage, since work was actually performed, but in the money section you'll mark Do Not Invoice. We'll cover money and invoices in a moment.

The other finished stage is: "Resolved". You'll use this when the work order is finished, but no work was actually done, and nothing should be logged or paid. This happens in cases like when the tenant calls you and says, "Never mind, it magically started working on its own."

The remaining stages should make sense from their description alone.

The work order "occasion", allows you to indicate if the timing of the work is conditional on, or related to, the occupancy. The help tip provides more details on the available options and how they work.

Below the stage selection is a progress graph. Key dates will be added as you take action on the work order, and you can see how far along the work order is, or if it gets stalled.

You can see this progress on an individual work order, or on all open maintenance in maintenance reports. These can be viewed by individual occupant, owner, vendor, or the entire company.

Let's move through the work order and take a look at some of its components. 

You'll notice that much of the work order is already filled in for you, because you created it from a work request that had the information completed. If you had skipped the work request and started this work order from scratch, it would be a blank slate.

First you see there's an appliance that may be relevant. This is a fridge, and it happens to be under warranty as indicated by the warranty badge.

If someone's going to be working on this appliance, you'd check this box. But right now, you're planning to head out to the tenant's place yourself to check things out first, since it's a new movein and we suspect human error, not an appliance malfunction.

Next you see the unit's keys. You see that there's a registered key in your key cabinet that can be issued to the vendor. 

If you need to check the key out to the vendor, select the key, and check it out to the vendor for this work order.

Note that if you already assigned the work order to the vendor, they'll be automatically entered as the person to whom the key is being checked out. 

If you've already set a required by date on the work order, the key's expected return date will be filled in.

You can also check the key out to one of your internal staff members, as long as they're in your user list.

Next we see the vendor to assign the work to. In this case, you're going to assign it to yourself, as you're going to do a little recon before any work is done.

However, this is a good time for a detour to cover vendors, vendor selection, and vendor suitability, before we actually assign any work orders. We'll return to this work order in a moment.

In Harmony, vendors can be imported from a database or list, added by the vendor through the candidacy system, or entered manually.

We won't cover vendor candidates in detail here, as that's an entire system covered in other resources. However, it's worth understanding that it is available to you.

When using the candidate system, you provide vendors with a link or QR code to your vendor candidate application. The vendor enters their information, including uploading any documentation you require like proof of insurance or  contractor registration.

You can configure your vendor candidate application to collect any information desired, like references, licenses, recent work, or anything else you deem necessary to engage with a vendor. When you review and accept the vendor's candidate application, their vendor prospect record is converted to an active vendor, and you can assign them work.

For now, we'll enter a vendor manually from our Management view.

Select the Add button for vendors.

The first selection is the vendor industry or profession. Select the help tip for additional information.

While you can enter anything free-form, it makes the most sense to establish a pre-defined list of industries and professions.

For example, someone who works on air conditioning systems could be referred to as "Air Conditioning", "HVAC", "AC", or "Heating and Cooling". By establishing and using a pre-defined list, you can be confident when you're searching for someone to take care of an air conditioning problem, you're getting the entire list of able vendors.

Your predefined list is configured in Settings, My Account, People, Vendor Industries/Professions. Select the View/Edit Types button.

You can manually add each industry or profession you interact with, or select List Options to view the system default list, or replace your current list with the system default.

The system default list may contain industries and professions you'll never use. In this case, just grab the sort handle and drag it out of the window to remove it.

When you're done, select the Save button.

Now, when adding the vendor, you can simply start typing, then select the match from the list.

Enter the remainder of the vendor information, using the help tips for additional clarity on the purpose or options in a given field.

In the suitability section, none of our metrics have yet been established, as this is a brand new vendor.

As this vendor performs work, their ratings are automatically updated.

The time performance metric indicates if the vendor completes work early or on time, or late.

The budget performance metric indicates if the vendor completes work at or under the estimate, or over the estimate.

The experiences rating metric is the number of stars your people give the vendor in post-work experience surveys. A vendor who is consistently rated well by tenants after they've had an interaction with a vendor will have a high rating.

You'll consider these metrics, and other unstated metrics, to assign the vendor a rank or preference score. For example, you may have a vendor who employs eco-friendly green processes. This is not considered in their metrics, but if it's a preferred quality by your company, you can increase their rank accordingly.

Vendors with a higher rank are displayed above those with a lower rank when searching for a vendor to do a specific job.

When assigning work to a vendor, you can review all of their suitability data. You don't need to return to their profile to see it.

Other factors that are often considered when assigning work include the conditions or terms, and the area where the vendor provides services. The service area is a free form description that will be understood by someone with knowledge of the area. The service zips will match against a property zip to exclude a vendor if they won't go there.

The financial information is necessary for paying vendors. Again, help tips will assist in understanding the meaning of each option.

There are two items that overlap with services agreements. If you've completed a services agreement, you noticed there are advanced fields for tracking insurance coverages, policies, dates, and more. 

However, a basic version of this is also available here, so you still have it for vendors even when you don't create a full services agreement.

If a vendor requires active workers comp, be sure to enter its expiration here so Harmony can alert you when it's coming up on expiration, so you don't accidentally dispatch a vendor who has allowed their workers comp to expire.

When you're done, select Next Step.

You'll have the option to create their services agreement.

Again, we're not going to cover services agreements in detail here. They're covered in other resources. It's worth using them if you want to record and track all details of a vendor's insurance, licenses, certifications, and copies of all their documented proof of these items.

We'll skip the services agreement, and go back to the work order we were previously working on.

In Assigned To, select the icon, "Search Vendors".

You'll see a list of all vendors in the system. You can filter this list by entering some information about them, like their name or company name, or by selecting the industry or profession you need.

The most suitable vendors appear at the top of the list.

In this case, the top vendor has a geographic match, which means you know they will provide service in this unit's zip code.

You also see they have a high rank/preference. Select either of these icons for vendor suitability details.

As mentioned previously, a new vendor who has not done any work for you won't have performance or review metrics yet.

We see this vendor's in the right industry for what's needed, they work in the area where this unit is located, and you've given them a high rank.

If you wanted to assign work to this vendor, you'd simply select them.

However, if you recall, you'd already decided you want visit the unit yourself, to greet the tenant in their new digs, and to make sure nothing was left disconnected during the last vacancy.

In this case, you'll assign the work to the system, "MANAGER" account, which assigns it internally.

Normally we can't predict the future, but in this world of make-believe, we know that you're going to discover the fridge is defective, and you'll circle back later. Harmony makes this easy.

Let's scroll through the remainder of the work order to confirm the information brought in from the work request, and add any other relevant information.

Dates are important. They communicate expectation to the vendor, put things on your schedule where you can track them, and alert you when something's not done as expected. They also allow automatic calculation of on time performance.

In this case, you want to alert the tenant that you're coming, and give them the opportunity to confirm the appointment, so you'll select the appointment confirmation button.

You can schedule any time to deliver the appointment confirmation request to the tenant. If the work is scheduled for next week, for example, you may not want them to confirm the appointment until a day or two in advance.

In the resources section, you see that you don't currently have any assignable resources. Resources are a powerful system in Harmony where you can grant, lend, or rent resources, and are covered in detail elsewhere. 

In this case, if there's any resource you would need to issue to the vendor to complete the work, like renting them your whiz-bang wrench, this is where you'd assign it, to track it, get it back, and charge for it as appropriate.

The request section provides details on the request that created this work order. If there's a specific notification expectation or requirement, enter it here so the vendor can appropriately notify the requester of work completion or problems. 

The money section allows us to enter details on the financial aspects of the work order.

The limits and authorization sections from this unit's management agreement display to guide you. If the work is expected to cost more than the expense limit, you may want to set this work order to require owner approval before starting work.

Work order estimets and/or totals can be withheld from an owner's distribution until they're invoiced. This is a configuration setting available to you. 

Additionally, if you're scheduling work far in advance, you can exclude this work cost from withholding until a date in the future.

If an occupant co-pay applies to this work, select this. When the work is invoiced, you'll be prompted to add the occupant co-pay.

For each work order, you have the option to internally track time, billing, and permits. In most cases, the vendor is responsible for this - all you care about is that they complete the work correctly, on time, and on budget.

However, if you have an in-house maintenance department, or have another reason to track this internally, this is where you do it.

Work permits is a complete Harmony system that enables you to manage the permitting process for work requiring permits. 

If this work includes something that requires a permit, use the work permit system for dealing with all communications, documentation, fees, and stages of the permitting process.

Once you've established that work requires a permit, the work order will be held - awaiting permits - and as you move through the permitting process and receive your permit, the work can resume.

This is covered in more detail in other resources. In this case, we don't need a permit, so we'll skip past it.

In the documents, photos, and videos section, you'll see anything that was uploaded by the requester in their work request. This might include something like a photo or video of the item requiring repair. 

You can add anything else that may be pertinent. If you're using Harmony from your tablet, you can just take a photo or video. Otherwise, you can upload anything from your files.

Vendors can also add photos, videos, and other files to the work order. You'll see an indicator to show which are vendor supplied items, after they're added to the work order.

The checklists option is also a complete Harmony system, that we won't cover in detail here.

In summary, you can create checklist templates and checklists to be completed by any of the parties involved in this work. Checklists are not limited to work orders, they're available throughout Harmony for any event or interaction.

As an example, let's imagine this unit previously had a cleaning work order to be done before tenant move in. Your checklist might have included, "test each appliance to ensure it functions". If that had been done, the tenant would never have moved into a unit with a non-functioning fridge!

For this scenario, you'd create a checklist template for pre-move-in cleaning, then assign that checklist to the vendor in the cleaning work order.

When the work order has been fully entered, select the notification options. Remember that notification options can default to always, never, or optional, based on your settings.

Here we'll see you can notify the vendor assigned, the occupants of the unit, and the owners of the unit.

If the stage of the work order is waiting for vendor acceptance or owner approval, and you've merged the appropriate links in the notification template, they'll have the option to accept or approve from their notification. Otherwise, they can do this from their portal.

Select Save Work Order.

You now have a work order in the system, ready to be done by the manager, with a pending appointment confirmation.

You can see this on your Harmony calendar for today. From here you can see the appointment status, and view the work order if desired. 

The tenant received the appointment confirmation request by email and text. This is based on your configured template, so, just like with all other messages, you can customize it to your heart's content.

On your calendar, in your maintenance list, and in your work order, you now see that the appointment was confirmed. Your vendor can also see this on the work order in their portal.

In our imaginary scenario, you're now hopping into your car to drive out to meet the tenant. As predicted, you found that the fridge is plugged in, the outlet is working, and you've still got a dead appliance.

You welcome the tenant into their new home, thank them for letting you know about the fridge, and inform them you'll be sending out a repairman to fix or replace the fridge.

Hop on your tablet, and take care of this right now.

While you could reassign the work order to an appliance vendor, you decide that you want to keep a clear paper trail to show that there were actually two dispatched orders on this request.

Like many things in Harmony, you have the choice of doing things quickly, or taking an extra moment to log everything to reflect reality.

We've found that property managers benefit when they take the extra few seconds to make their input reflect the reality of their work. It means that you don't have to wonder, remember, or note things that you or someone else may need to know.

To keep the record straight, create a brand new work order. It's easy, because all of the data is already in the system from the work request.

From the maintenance list or the work order, preview and expand the original work request, then add a new work order.

For the purposes of this demonstration, give the vendor the chance to accept or decline the work. Set the stage to Assigned.

Mark the fridge as the item being worked on, from the appliances list.

Select the vendor who is authorized to do warranty work on this fridge, and add notes for them.

Let's skip the appointment confirmation on this one, since we're demonstrating a work order that the vendor has not yet accepted.

Increase the priority of this work order, as the tenant might starve if they have no place to put their groceries.

Select to notify the vendor. You might consider changing the setting on this to always notify the vendor, since you've now discovered you want vendors to have an email for every new and changed work order.

Even if you select Always Notify, you can still turn off notification for any individual work order.

Select Save Work Order.

While you wait for the vendor to accept the work, go ahead and resolve the work order you just took care of in your own recon.

This can be viewed from the request, or from the maintenance list that you see after adding the new work order.

There's no specific order required for this. You could have done this step before adding the new work order. However, you were anxious to get the vendor assigned quickly, so you chose this order of operations.

Choose Resolved for this one, not Completed, since you didn't actually do any work on the fridge. You're counting this as a courtesy visit.

Add internal notes for your own records, then save the work order. This work order now drops off your list, but is still available in the history for this unit, and for the people involved.

The vendor has received the email or text notification of this work order, with the option to accept or decline work.

After selecting the link, they can review details, and accept the work.

Note that these things are all customizable. This is covered in other resources, including portal setup.

A dashboard alert shows you that the vendor accepted the work.

View the work order to see this status on the work order. The work order has automatically changed the stage to, Accepted by Vendor.

Now that you know this, you can change the stage to, In Progress, for improved tracking.

A prompt shows that you have not yet entered a start time for this work. If you're assuming the work starts now, since the vendor has accepted it, leave the default. If you want to wait until something else happens, change it.

As discussed previously, you can make any changes to the work order as needed, create a new appointment confirmation, send an email or text to the tenant or vendor, print the work order for your records, or any one of a number of other things that may be related to this work order.

Anything that you do on this work order is attached to the work order permanently. This includes communications, file uploads, activities, projects, events, or any other action.

View the standard options from the, "options drop-down", in the top right of the work order.

In addition to the email or text notification, and in this case, the work order acceptance, the vendor can manage the work order through their portal, when enabled.

Not only can they view the work order, the vendor can also perform a number of other functions.

First is changing the stage. When they complete work, this is what they'll change.

Harmony also includes a job log system. When this is used, the vendor checks in to the job upon arrival, and checks out upon departure.

Job logs allow you to effectively communicate with the occupant, and verify the vendor shows up when they said they would, and confirm the vendor has actually spent the time they're billing for.

The job log tracks the geolocation of the vendor, as well as fine details that help reduce dishonesty.

The vendor can also update estimates or totals for the work.

In this case, as a warranty repair, you might not expect work cost. However, in this situation, you may have agreed to pay the vendor a trip charge, or any other variety of scenarios.

The vendor can provide notes to you directly through the portal, and can upload photos, videos, and other files related to the work.

When the work is complete, the vendor changes the stage to Completed and is prompted to enter the completed date, and a cost if not already indicated.

In your dashboard, you'll see an alert for each item the vendor did in their portal.

When you view this work order, you'll see a few things.

First, you have the opportunity to send an experience survey to the tenant.

Select the button, and confirm.

The tenant will receive an email and/or text message with your custom experience survey message, as you configured it.

After they complete the survey, their responses are logged - and update the scores of the tenant, the vendor, and your company, based on the survey responses.

We'll come back to this in a moment.

Also in the work order, you'll see a section has been added for the job log, indicating when the vendor arrived on site, and when they departed.

There's also an alert showing that all work orders from the original request are now complete.

Select this to view the original request.

You'll be prompted to mark the request as resolved, or you can skip it if there's something wrong, and investigate or create another work order.

In this case, mark the request as resolved, add any notes as suitable, notify the tenant, and save.

We're now done with this work order!

As you get comfortable with a computerized maintenance management system, you'll find this process only takes a few moments for each work request and work order.

Let's take a quick look at some things that happened as a result of this work.

First, the tenant now has an experience rating. This experience rating is an indicator of how happy they are with you, as their landlord or property manager, based on all surveys submitted for each interaction you have with them.

Surveys and experience scores are a valuable metric in your tenant retention strategy. There are numerous tools and reports to deal with experiences, which are covered in depth in other resources.

Then you see that the vendor now has performance and experience metrics that help you determine their suitability. 

If you don't see these update right away, don't worry. Performance scores are retabulated periodically, typically daily, instead of immediately after each work order completion.

Your maintenance reports and statistics have also been updated. 

Let's take a look at those next.

As with most things in Harmony, you can see maintenance by a place, by a person, or for the entire company.

In the case of this work order, you had five different entities involved: the unit the work was done on, the tenant requesting the work, the vendor performing the work, the owner paying for the work, and the company who processed and ordered the work.

From each of their views, you can see maintenance they were involved in.

For example, when viewing a unit, you can see all maintenace on the unit, no matter who the tenant, owner, or vendor were.

When viewing a tenant, you can see all maintenance performed for them, regardless of the unit, owner, or vendor.

When viewing an owner, you can see all maintenance done for them, including all of their units, each tenant, and every vendor.

Viewing a vendor shows you all maintenance they've done, for every unit, tenant, and owner.

Viewing maintenance for your company shows you everything for everyone, everywhere.

Each one has metrics relevant only to them, which can give you a lot of insight that helps you fine-tune your management business.

This is the 3D power of Harmony in action.

Let's take a look at company maintenance reports.

It helps to understand the difference between lists and reports in Harmony. You don't generally run daily operations from reports. Instead, regular routines are performed from dynamic lists.

Reports give you a way to analyze maintance, and discover patterns and issues. They help you fine-tune your business and portfolio, but they're generally not where you go to manage maintenance.

We'll look at reports first, then come back and look at managing maintenance from dynamic lists.

Select company, then reports.

Scroll down to the maintenance section. Select the, "open maintenance", report, to show everything that's not resolved or completed.

As with most reports, you can toggle between a summary view and a detail view with the toggle button.

Select it to view the detail view of open maintenance.

The first section shows the outline of work requests, with their related work orders.

Scroll down to see the outline of work orders.

Below that are charts and graphs showing open maintenance by vendor, category, type, and stage.

At the bottom is the summary of open maintenance by unit and property, first as data, and then as a chart.

To download this report as a spreadsheet, select the options drop down, then Download Report.

Next, let's look at our finished maintenance report.

Select View Reports List from the options drop down. Choose the Finished Maintenance Report.

Again, for this demonstration, toggle to the detail view.

We see work requests first.

Each work request has an indicator to show how long it took to resolve.

At the bottom are the work request metrics. Since we're looking at this from the company perspective, what we see are all metrics for the company, within the date range selected.

Work orders also display the time to completion, along with a financial graph showing the estimate related to the total and the limit.

Below the work order outline are the work order metrics. Again, we're seeing the metrics for the entire company here.

Next are graphs showing finished work orders by vendor, then by category and type.

At the bottom is the finished work by unit and property, as data, then as a graph.

You'll likely find many different ways to analyze maintenance data to improve your operational efficiency.

We mentioned it already, but in Harmony there are two ways to finish a work order. We call a work order, "resolved," when we're done with it, but nothing actually changed. We call it, "completed," when we're done, and work was done.

One valuable metric is work orders resolved without work. This is an indicator that you can improve efficiency by focusing on occupant communication on the front end - when a work request is received, before a work order is created.

Another metric, percent of work orders completed late, could indicate that your vendors are slow. However, it could also indicate that you're setting unachievable deadlines. One leaves you with dissatisfied occupants, the other results in dissatistfied vendors.

When you have one unit with way more maintenance than others, there are a few things to look at. You might just have a unit that's falling apart. Or, you might have a tenant that is overexhuberant in reporting problems. Or, you could have a vendor who cuts corners. Looking at the total cost, you may find a situation where you need to put some pressure on the owner to rehab the unit during the next vacancy. Digging into the data tells you a lot, and helps you streamline your business.

Use these report metrics to get to the bottom of operational inefficiencies.

Going back to the report list, you'll see a number of other maintenance reports. Your account may have more or fewer reports, depending on your account type. You may also have optional or custom reports enabled.

Take a moment to look through the other reports.

If there's maintenance data you need in a report format, and it's not available in your reports list, select the Additional Reports option at the bottom. Submit your request. 

There may be an existing optional report with the data you're seeking, or we may be able to create a custom report for your needs.

Note that a download of a report may contain additional data not represented on the screen. Downloads are useful for advanced analysis and calculations.

Let's return to the dashboard.

Earlier, we covered dealing with maintenance from your alerts and action boxes. These show you when something happens, when something's waiting, or when something's overdue.

While it is important to keep an eye on these items, if you have a high maintenance volume, you'll spend more of your time managing from lists, rather than from alerts.

To view your maintenance list, select Management, then Maintenance.

The list shows open maintenance. If you'd like to see finished maintenance, select the Finished Maintenance toggle button.

To show only maintenance for a specific unit, vendor, tenant, type, or word in the content, enter it in the filter results box.

Select the Show All icon to switch back to viewing everything.

At the top of your list, work requests awaiting work orders are displayed.

These are likely your highest priority. They indicate someone has asked for something, but you have not figured out what to do about it yet.

Hover over a work request to see a preview, or click or tap to open it, where you can see full details and edit.

Below this are your quote requests awaiting a work order.

These can be set to be included or excluded from your maintenance list in settings, as desired.

Quote requests are an entire maintenance system, and we'll come back to them later.

Below that are, work orders.

The icons provide a lot of information about the work order, including the requester, type, category, whether the work order originated from a work request or quote request, and if it's overdue.

Hover over a work order to preview it. Select a requester, place, or vendor to view their details, or select the work order to open and edit it.

At the bottom are your maintenance action boxes. These are the items that are most important to resolve. Items that are waiting but not overdue have light colored action boxes, while items that are overdue have darker action boxes, based on your selected color theme.

We've said it before, and we'll likely say it again soon: in Harmony, there are numerous ways to look at your data.

Here you're looking at everything, for everyone. You can view the maintenance list from any person, or from any unit or property, to see only related maintenance.

Often you'll want to see maintenance for all people and places, but in a more granular way than is presented on this list.

To do this, select the Maintenance Advanced Search icon.

In this search, select all the parameters you're looking for, and search.

Further refine the results, by entering a search term into the filter results box.

From this list, we can also perform bulk actions.

Choose the, "Select Multiple" button, then check the boxes for the work orders to perform a bulk action on. Use the checkbox in the header to select or deselect all work orders in the list.

In the bottom left, choose the bulk action. We'll look at each one.

Print combines all selected work orders into a PDF suitable for downloading and printing.

This is typically used when you want a printout of all work orders open for an individual vendor, or all work orders done on a specific unit, or all work orders that need to be done today.

Reassign to, allows you to reassign all of the selected work orders to a different vendor.

Let's say, for example, handyman hank calls to let you know he's going on vacation from July 4th to July 11th.

Simply search all work orders for handyman hank with a required by date during hank's vacation. 

Bulk reassign all these to handyman harold, and you've just freed up hank for a worry-free vacation!

Change Stage, allows you to change the stage of selected work orders in bulk.

In this scenario, Pete the Plumber doesn't use the portal to mark his work orders complete.

Instead, he walks into your office with a stack of printed work orders with a, "Done", stamp on them.

Pull up his list of work orders, and as you go through each page, check its box.

Then, select the, "Change Stage" action, and select the stage, "Completed".

You've just marked all Pete's work as finished, without having to edit any of the individual work orders.

For any of the bulk actions, when you're ready, select the change button at the bottom right to complete the bulk change.

Let's talk for a moment about quote requests, then wrap up with a quick look at recording received invoices for work orders.

If you're going to use quote requests, please take a moment to review other resources that cover them in detail. Here we'll just touch on them briefly, so you understand their purpose.

Quote requests, also called requests for quote, abbreviated as RFQ, are used when you want to engage multiple vendors in the process of estimating or bidding for work.

We'll typically create a quote request on behalf of one of our owners or associations. You can go to the owner first, or select, Add Quote Request, from this maintenance list.

To select an owner, enter part of their name or something else about them, or select them by entering something about a unit you manage for them.

Identify the matching owner to create the quote request for, and select them.

Give a name to the project being quoted, then add as many participating vendors as you want.

When vendors respond through their portal or notification links, they will enter their own details, including totals, estimates, dates, and questions or comments.

If you have a vendor walk into your office with his printed quote, or call you with a verbal quote, you have the opportunity to enter this information directly.

Describe the project in sufficient detail for vendors to estimate or quote.

Choose the type of RFQ, instructions for estimating or quoting, evaluation or selection parameters, and dates.

Add any additional files for the vendors, including documents, photos, and/or videos.

If there is a checklist required, add checklists from your predefined templates.

Notify the participating vendors by selecting the notification button.

Just like with work orders, vendors will be notified according to the contacts and settings in their profile.

Each vendor will follow the instructions to deliver an estimate or quote, normally by clicking the link in their notification email.

Harmony alerts you when each vendor has submitted their quote, and when all vendors have submitted quotes or the response deadline is reached.

You can review all submissions together on the RFQ, with a graph showing the quote range.

You'll consider any additional details provided by the vendors, the rank and suitability of the vendors, and award the work to your selected vendor.

From the awarded quote request, create a Work Order for the work. Just like with a work request, the work order will be filled in with the relevant details from the quote request.

Finally, let's take a quick look at recording the invoices for work performed.

This overlaps with bookkeeping and accounting, and is covered in detail in other resources.

However, it's important to understand where maintenance and invoices intersect.

When assigned work is complete, normally your vendor will provide you with an invoice.

In some cases, you may record an invoice on their behalf, based on details they provide with their finished work orders.

You can enforce the requirement that all work orders must be marked complete before they can be invoiced, by configuring it in your maintenance settings.

There are different ways that you can add an invoice:

Add, receive an invoice, as a quick launch button so you can access it directly from any primary view in your dashboard.

Go to Management, Money, Add Invoice.

Look up the completed work order and add the invoice from the money section.

Go to the owner's money view and select Add an Invoice.

For this demonstration, you'll record the invoice from the quick launch option.

Select the owner responsible for this invoice, either by some information about them, or some information about the unit the work was done on.

Locate the match you're looking for, and select them.

If this invoice requires owner approval before paying, and you do not have this set as a default, select it here.

The owner can approve an invoice from their notification, or from their portal.

Select the work order being invoiced for. Since you didn't enforce only completed work orders, the list includes work orders not yet complete.

By selecting an unfinished work order, the invoice process will prompt you to mark it complete.

If you are paying an invoice before the vendor has done the work, you can uncheck this.

Select the work order icon to review the work order, with its estimates, job log, notes, and other details you need to look at before recording the invoice.

If there are multiple work orders on the same invoice, select the add button, then select each work order.

Any values available from the selected work orders will be entered into the invoice record.

Add the other details from the provided invoice.

If the vendor provides payment terms, and you've recorded this in their profile, the due date is automatically set.

Otherwise, you can manually set the due date, or use the calculator for help.

In this case, for demonstration simplicity, we haven't enabled invoice markups or invoice discounts in our settings. These are both available, and they add more options to the invoice.

In the bottom half of the invoice, enter the bill details.

While an invoice usually only results in a single bill, it can be split into multiple bills.

For example, a single invoice may include both maintenance expenses and capital improvements. If you are tracking these separately for the owner's reports, you can enter each as a separate bill as part of the same invoice.

The total of the bill, or of all of the bills, must equal the total of the invoice. If you are splitting an invoice into multiple bills, Harmony will guide you through the process.

This is covered in more detail in other resources.

If you're recording a scanned file of the provided invoice, use the file attachment option.

If your vendor emailed you the invoice as an attachment, and you have Harmony's inbound messaging connected in CRM, the email attachment will show here, to be attached to the invoice.

When you are done, select Add Invoice.

The invoice now has the work order attached to it, which you can see whenever you're looking at the invoice.

The work order also has the invoice displayed in its money section, with its payment status.

Obviously this was a very high level overview of invoices. Please take the time to review other resources before you jump into Harmony accounting.

It's worth reviewing all of your settings to make Harmony match your business processes. However, there's one other setting that is worth highlighting.

Many CMMS's use a numbering system for work requests, work orders, invoices, and the like. In Harmony, users more often refer to them by their name, dates, and people involved.

If numbers are your thing, simply go to settings, My Account, Preferences, and enable item numbering for records. Now, each of your items displays the number of the record, in addition to the name.

We've only scratched the surface of maintenance in Harmony. 

There are so many more options, settings, and special situations that you may encounter.

There's so much we haven't covered, but we trust this has been useful in helping you get started.

It's time to relax, grab a margarita, and wait for your next work request to arrive!