Share
/ Blog / Top 5 Business Apps Every Property Manager Should Be Using

Top 5 Business Apps Every Property Manager Should Be Using

management apps imageExpense reports, learning the latest marketing avenues, meeting clients and owners, managing our personal calendars and to-do lists. There is no denying that a vacation rental manager’s job is time intensive and any tools that can help save us time from our day-to-day tasks, brings us time to allocate towards marketing our properties and thus increasing revenue.

Here at Kigo we are very focused on ensuring property managers use the latest technology tools to save time and increase productivity. As such, this week we have researched far and wide to bring you the 5 most popular time-saving tools on the market:

1. Expensify

Expense reports… Probably one of the top tasks that we all just love to hate. If you need to save your receipts for expense reports, you will have felt the pain of having to manage hundreds of receipts a month and delightfully inputting them into an expense report. Not to mention the hassle that ensues when we accidentally lose one or more of those receipts.

Expensify has come to the rescue of hundreds of vacation rental managers, by allowing you to simply take a photo of a receipt, which it automatically converts it into a report. If you have lost your receipt, simply manually enter the data and Expensify will add it to your monthly expense report.

Cost: Free up to 2 users, with additional users costing $5 – $10 a month

2. Hours

Efficiency tracking… Now this isn’t a mandated task, but realising where we spend our time during the month will significantly help us figure out ways in which we can improve our efficiency. Maybe at the end of the month we realise that we spend way too much time arranging tasks with our housekeeping staff, and with a simple tool we can actually cut that time down for very little cost.

iPhone and iPad app Hours, allows you to input where you spend your time and who you spend it with, and creates a comprehensive report that shows your most time-intensive tasks. Start tracking how much time you spend meeting home owners, housekeeping staff or even how much time you spend commuting between rental properties. It might even come in handy when you have to prove to home-owners just how many hours it takes to manage their property.

Cost: Free

3. Dropbox

It’s hard not to love Dropbox. It truly has revolutionized the way we can share documents among our devices and among our team-mates. Now I am guessing that a majority of you already know to use Dropbox: the App, the Desktop tool and the web-based app to manage and share your documents. What you might not know if the fantastic article that Macworld wrote called “62 Things You Can Do With Dropbox

Cost: Up to 18 Gb is Free (you will need to refer others to gain this much space) and for $9.99/month you can purchase 100GB

4. Instapaper

While in the middle of an important task, one thing leads to another and you find yourself reading a very interesting article that is educational, but in no way helpful for the task you were doing. Bookmarks are great for “reading later”, but it’s not hard to admit that we rarely visit the bookmarks tab during our free time. That’s where Instapaper comes into play: whenever you read an interesting blog post, you can save them to your Instapaper account and you it will automatically be saved in a reader-friendly format that you can later use on your computer, iPhone, iPad or Kindle.

Now you have no excuse for missing out on a Kigo Marketing article!

Cost: Free

5. Remember the Milk

The name itself should be enough incentive to download this extremely-popular management app. Many business apps have tried to skilfully master the to-do list, but have not been able to quite mirror the success of Remember the Milk.

Not only is it tremendously easy to add and update day-to-day tasks, but Remember the Milk has sharing and syncing capabilities with just about any device, from smartphones, to tablets, to popular mail programs such as Gmail and Outlook.

We hope that all if not just a few of these tools catch your attention and help you save a significant amount of time when managing your vacation rental properties.

Do you use any other business apps to help save you time? Join the conversation by sharing your favourite apps int he comment section below!

 

Don't forget that the single biggest time-saving you can use as a Vacation Rental Manager is Kigo's Reservation System and Channel Manager. Shave hours of administrative tasks off your plate with our industry leading solutions.  For more information contact one of our vacation rental software experts at [email protected] or on the phone (Europe) +34 512 702 104 ‧ (Asia) +66 (0) 92 471 8426

Contact Sales