Why Every Property Manager Needs an External Database (Especially During a Software Transition)
Avoid data disasters and automate like a boss—how we’re surviving our move from Propertyware to Rentvine with help from Airtable, EasyCSV, and a healthy fear of cloud outages.
Many of you know that my own PM company is in the middle of our transition from Propertyware to Rentvine as we speak. We went live on Rentvine earlier this month, and right now we’re working on cleaning up all of the loose ends from the software integrations, scheduled reports that were going to different places, etc.
As I’ve gone through this process, I’ve been very thankful that we’ve maintained an external data warehouse for much of our data for years. We use Airtable for this purpose, but you can do the same thing in Google Sheets, Excel, a SQL database, etc. Basically what you want is an automatically updated central database of owners, residents, properties, vendors, etc. This way, even if your main PM software is down, or you have to change it (like we’re doing), you’ll still have a central repository of all of that data. Let’s say the internet is having one of its wonderful days where CloudFlare or AWS or Azure or one of the many other platforms that can ruin our entire internet day goes down, and you’re showing up to court and need to know what a tenant’s unpaid balance is. Fear not! With an external database completely separate from your PM accounting software that is down at the moment, you can pull up that balance right now, and you know it can’t be more than a day out of date at most.
So in today’s content for our paid PMAssist Insider subscribers, I’m going to show you how to update a database automatically each day using a scheduled CSV report from your PM accounting software. Continue below for paid subscribers.
