The most important task you have once your units are ready is to get them online. But while you'll need some haste, you'll also need a well-considered checklist for getting student rooms online effectively.
In our Cloudfox guide, we'll give you that checklist, so all you need to do is customise it and hand it over to your team.
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There will be several considerations in building your PBSA checklist for getting student rooms online effectively. These should include:
Once you have these strategies laid out, it's time to create your staff checklist for uploading room listings.
Below is our standard checklist for PBSA businesses - Remember, at each stage, you should customise your list for how you work and the systems you use.
You'll want to start with your list of tasks and people responsible. The crucial factor for consideration here isn't just who does what and when but how that task affects other functions in the overall workflow and contributing or resulting workflows.
For example, if you need sign off from investors have you accounted for task completion dates and multiple rounds of revision? If not, the delay could hold up your room rate sign-off task, which means your website or PMS admin doesn’t have the data to add to each listing when needed.
Take some time to map out your workflow with your management team before you get to step number two.
Automation is about making your life easier. Think - how can you use tech to help you reduce some of those more mundane manual tasks?
Let's look at our room rate problem again. If your finance team has set the prices and relevant stakeholders sign these off, can these be input once, and all systems sync that information to save time on manual data entry? Or errors in manual entries? And if so, where would that data need to be input first?
The beauty of a great system setup is that it is built with these automation nuances in mind, so all you need to do is set them in motion to make the process of getting your units online simpler.
Once you have automation mapped out, it will be far easier to delegate staff tasks, knowing that each job will be detailed and allocated in good time.
Good task designation matches the right team member to the right task at the right time. Great task designation automates timely notifications, so your team member knows about the job ahead of time and its priority level, and has everything they need to complete the task.
Helping your team manage new tasks alongside their day-to-day will be crucial if you have multiple projects and buildings on the go at once.
Depending on your choice of property management software (PMS), the rollout of simple workflows can be managed in-house in most cases without multiple system additions and unnecessary add-ons. For those initial system setups and more complicated workflows, we always recommend bringing professional consultation, if not the entire project undertaking. Why? Because it will avoid teething problems and be better for your budget.
Once you have your workflow operational, all you will need to do is have your management team brief staff about what's coming and how it affects their current work.
The oversight of your workflow setup comes in the form of sandbox testing. Ask yourself - Is your workflow fit for purpose and as effective as possible?
The second stage of oversight you'll need is within the workflow itself. How can you create oversight steps or stages that help your management team establish performance?
By giving you a checklist you can customise, we've created a process you establish once and review over time, making your team much more efficient from year to year. Relieving the pain of getting student rooms online means your team can focus on marketing and sales - exactly where you need to concentrate when a suite of new rooms or a building becomes available.
Need help mapping and rolling out core functions and system setups? Contact Eddie using the form below.