Matching vendor invoices against work orders and owner charges
Two lists that ought to agree. Every invoice paid this month, and every work order that authorised work. The rows failing to line up are where fee income goes: a markup written into the management agreement but applied by hand and skipped, a job billed against the wrong unit at a multi unit address, a second invoice from a vendor who bills per visit rather than per job, and a no access trip charge sitting on the owner when the lease puts it on the resident. The accounting system raises none of these, because both sides posted cleanly.
The management system is authoritative for money and knows nothing about the phone call where the owner approved the repair.
A management company runs two ledgers that must never mix: the money it holds for owners and tenants, and its own. Everything downstream of that separation is regulated, which shapes what automation is allowed to touch.
- AppFolio
- Property Meld
- QuickBooks Online
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if your vendors invoice in a bundle at month end with no job reference. Matching needs a key on both sides, and where an invoice names only a street, somebody has to decide which of four open orders it belongs to before any rule can run at all.
The constraint that shapes it
In most states property management is licensed brokerage activity, which means the company operates under a broker and its handling of client funds is supervised, with segregation from operating money and periodic reconciliation expected. More on how this sector works.
Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
- Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
- Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
- Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
- Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
- Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
- How do I find repairs billed without the management markup?
- Why is a vendor invoice charged to the wrong unit?
- How do I catch duplicate vendor invoices for the same repair?
- Who pays for a no access trip charge on a repair?
- How do I match vendor bills to work orders each month?
Back to property management, or see how this is priced and scoped.