If running your property rental business has started to feel like a full-time admin job, you’re not alone.
The private rented sector is now more heavily regulated than ever before, and as a result, landlords are spending an increasing amount of time on administrative tasks. From keeping up with changing legislation and managing compliance certificates to keeping digital financial records, the list goes on.
Fortunately, many of these routine tasks no longer need to be carried out manually. Specialist landlord software can automate many of the more repetitive tasks involved in running a rental portfolio, helping landlords minimise errors and free up more time to focus on growing a more profitable portfolio.
In this article, we’ll explore seven everyday property management tasks that can be automated using the PaTMa Property Manager software to help you run your rental business more efficiently.
The everyday landlord tasks you should be automating
Not every aspect of property management can or should be automated. Carrying out property inspections, making strategic business decisions, and building positive relationships with tenants will always require a human touch.
However, many landlords find that it’s the repetitive, routine jobs that take up the largest proportion of their time. These are the jobs you should be automating. Property management software like PaTMa can help streamline day-to-day property management, freeing up more of your time for strategic business planning.
Here are the top seven property management tasks to consider automating as soon as possible.
How to Automate Rental Income and Expense Tracking
Keeping accurate and up-to-date financial records has always been one of the most time-consuming parts of being a landlord, particularly if you manage more than one property. Manually entering transactions from bank statements, invoices, and receipts is a repetitive and time-consuming task.
Making Tax Digital now requires landlords to keep digital accounts and submit more frequent tax updates to HMRC, making it more important than ever for landlords to find more efficient ways to manage their bookkeeping.
PaTMa’s Property Manager software uses the Open Banking integration to allow landlords to automatically sync all their rental income and expenditure directly from their bank account into their landlord software in real-time. It also automatically categorises your transactions, helping to keep your accounts accurate and up to date and saving you a significant amount of time on manual data entry and reconciliation.
Key benefits of automating:
- Save time on bookkeeping.
- Improve accuracy.
- Record transactions in real-time.
- Simplify tax reporting.
How to Automate Making Tax Digital (MTD) Tax Reporting
For many landlords, tax deadlines often involve a frantic last-minute scramble to record income, categorise expenses, and reconcile accounts with bank statements.
Using automation to record and categorise transactions in real-time helps take the stress out of quarterly tax submissions, ensuring that most of the work has already been done for you when each deadline arrives. Rather than spending hours compiling figures, PaTMa’s Property Manager tool can generate the reports you need for your tax return with a single click, making the whole process simple and stress-free.
Key benefits of automating:
- Save time on tax reporting.
- Reduce stress before tax submission deadlines.
- Peace of mind that submissions are accurate.
- Support MTD compliance.
How to Automate Property Compliance Tracking and Reminders
The introduction of new legislation, like the Renters’ Rights Act, means the private rented sector is now more heavily regulated than ever before. Staying on top of compliance deadlines has become challenging, particularly for landlords managing large portfolios. From gas and electrical safety certificates to energy performance certificates and landlord licences, landlords are responsible for keeping track of numerous compliance deadlines for every property they own. If you’re not organised or don’t have reliable processes in place, it’s easy to miss an important deadline, which could result in financial penalties, legal action, invalidated insurance, or restrictions on letting your property
Rather than relying on spreadsheets, calendar reminders, or memory, PaTMa’s landlord software acts as your own digital compliance assistant. It can be set up to automatically track important compliance deadlines and send you timely reminders before your certificates and licences expire, giving you plenty of time to arrange inspections or renewals to ensure your properties remain compliant.
Key benefits of automating:
- Comply with the law.
- Reduce the risk of missing important deadlines.
- Avoid fines and legal action.
- Provide peace of mind.
How to Automate Property Inventory Creation
Property inventories help to protect both landlords and tenants by providing evidence of the property’s condition at the start of the tenancy. Inventories help to prevent disputes and provide vital evidence if you need to make a deduction from the tenant’s deposit. However, manually creating a detailed inventory for every new tenancy is a repetitive and time-consuming job.
PaTMa’s inventory builder tool makes it quick and easy for landlords to generate detailed and professional inventories that meet industry standards and ensure nothing is overlooked.
Key benefits of automating:
- Professional and consistent documentation.
- Helps support deposit claims.
- Reduces the risk of disputes.
- Saves time manually creating inventories.
How to Automatically Create a Property Management Audit Trail
A detailed and accurate audit trail is invaluable when it comes to resolving disputes. It can help you to demonstrate exactly what happened, when it happened, and the actions you took, providing valuable evidence and helping to protect your position. However, trying to construct one manually by piecing together emails, documents, and notes from all different places is both time-consuming and unreliable.
PaTMa automatically records key activities like uploaded documents, maintenance requests, tenancy updates, and tenant communications in one central location, creating a clear audit trail as you go, with no effort required on your part.
Key benefits of automating:
- Provides invaluable evidence if disputes arise.
- Supports legal and compliance requirements.
- Records all activity in one central location.
How to Automate Rent Tracking and Arrears Management
If you only manage one rental property, it’s usually obvious if rent is late or goes unpaid. However, as your portfolio grows, keeping track of who has and hasn’t paid becomes increasingly difficult. Without a reliable system in place, overdue payments can easily be overlooked, affecting your cash flow and making it more difficult to recover arrears.
PaTMa automatically records what rent is due, payments received, and any outstanding balances, providing you with a simple, real-time overview of your rental income across your whole portfolio. This makes it easy to identify overdue payments, follow up with tenants promptly, and keep your cash flow on track.
Key benefits of automating:
- Identify overdue rent promptly.
- Monitor payment history.
- Improve cash flow visibility.
- Reduce administrative burden.
How to Automatically Monitor Your Property Portfolio's Performance
Understanding how your portfolio is performing at any given time helps you to make smarter, more informed business decisions. Without accurate, up-to-date financial insights, it is difficult to monitor cash flow, understand which properties are most profitable, or spot trends. However, manually generating performance reports is so time-consuming that few landlords have time for it, so they only gain these insights once they sit down to prepare their tax return, by which point valuable opportunities may have been missed.
Property Management software like PaTMa can automatically generate a variety of different performance reports using your real-time financial data, providing you with an instant overview of your portfolio’s income, expenditure, profitability, and overall performance. Having instant access to accurate performance reports can help you make faster, more informed decisions about your rental business.
Key benefits of automating:
- Provides a clear overview of portfolio performance.
- Supports better business decisions.
- Helps identify trends and opportunities.
How to Start Automating Your Property Management Processes
Are you leveraging automation to save time and streamline the day-to-day management of your portfolio?
Private rented sector laws and regulations are constantly evolving, and the administrative burden on landlords is increasing. Automating repetitive and time-consuming daily tasks, like bookkeeping, compliance, and performance monitoring, can help to give you the competitive edge by freeing up more of your time to focus on strategic business planning and pursuing new opportunities.
The easiest and most efficient way to incorporate automation into your daily operations is to use a specialist landlord software like PaTMa.
PaTMa is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to hit the ground running. It can be used to manage all the properties in your portfolio from one central location. It offers a wide range of tools to help with every aspect of running a successful portfolio of rental properties, from bookkeeping and document storage to a property inventory builder and task management tools. No more flitting between different apps, websites, and spreadsheets – just one organised place to store and manage everything from.
Ready to win back more time and start running your portfolio more efficiently? Book a free online demo or start your free trial today to learn more about how PaTMa works and what it can do.
