Fault reporting software for residents' associations: what the managing agent needs to know about each fault

How a fault reaches the agent's office today

A resident sees that the garage door stays open. She mentions it to the chair on the landing, or to the caretaker if there is one. The chair rings the office; someone on the managing agent's team picks up, jots it down wherever they can and rings the locksmith. The locksmith says he will come by. Three days later another resident asks in the stairwell group chat whether anyone has said anything, and the chair rings again. Nobody has done anything wrong, and even so nobody can say which day it was reported or when the trade committed to coming.

Multiply that by the blocks an office manages and by the five or six open faults in each. The managing agent ends up acting as a switchboard, and what the committee asks, «how long has this been like that?», is precisely what is not written down.

Faults in the common areas, and who is involved

The last column is what sets a block owned in common apart from any other property. The managing agent does not need to plan a technician's day; they need to answer with a date to a chair, to a trade and, if it comes to it, to an insurer.

Who should be able to report

This is the decision that most separates one product from another, and it has no single right answer.

• Every resident, from an app. Many property-administration products offer it. It gives transparency, but requires each owner to register, and in a block with residents in their eighties registration stalls halfway. It also multiplies repeat reports of the same bulb.
• A code at the front door. Whoever walks past scans it and fills in a form. It asks for no registration, but it does not filter either: everything comes in, including what is not the association's business.
• A short list. The caretaker, the chair, the committee and the office team speak, since they already receive everyone else's complaints. The resident's direct route is lost, and what is gained is that each fault comes in once and properly described.

No option suits every block. A large one with a caretaker does well with the short list; a small one with nobody at the door may prefer each resident to have their own route. The sensible thing is to choose knowing what is gained and what is lost.

Which products exist

Three families turn up under this search. Property-administration products handle the accounts, the service-charge bills, the meetings and the minutes, and include a section for faults; they are the heart of the office, and you most likely have one already. Building-maintenance products come from facility management and were designed for those with technicians and an inventory. And fault-reporting tools confine themselves to taking in the fault and following it. The first two, with names and with what each one's website states, are compared in building maintenance software; the third, in incident management software.

When it comes to choosing, three questions weigh more than the rest: whether the trade receives the job without registering anywhere, whether the product brings all your blocks together on one screen, and whether what comes out can be shown at a meeting.

What the law asks of the association and the agent

In Spain, the Horizontal Property Act makes the works needed to conserve the building and its common installations compulsory, without waiting for a vote, and charges the managing agent with ordering urgent repairs and reporting to the chair at once. It does not say how a report is to be recorded: keeping a timed log is the office's decision, not a legal requirement. Separately there are the inspections of the common installations, the lift first among them. Both, with their article, in regulations for residents' associations; and what a program can do with those dates, in mandatory inspections software.

Where Bedel fits, and what it does not do

Bedel belongs to the third family and the third option: a fault-reporting tool with a short list. It is not a CMMS and not a property-administration product. Each block has its own WhatsApp number. Those on its list write to it, usually the caretaker, the chair, the committee and the office staff; an ordinary resident cannot open tickets, and goes on telling whoever they used to tell. The caretaker sends a photo of the garage door and gets a number back. The ticket reaches the door company's phone, which accepts it from its own WhatsApp with nothing to install, and the caretaker learns that it has been accepted and, later, that it is sorted.

Whatever the association has flagged as urgent rings the on-call phone at any hour, and someone trapped in the lift always does. If the trade lets the deadline pass, the ticket goes up to whoever is above, normally the managing agent. Each ticket leaves three times, report, acceptance and closure, in an Excel file that can be taken to the meeting. And the block's dated inspections arrive once a month, on WhatsApp, with whoever handles them. It is told with a full example in incidents in residents' associations, and for other kinds of property, in incident management on WhatsApp.

What it does not do, worth knowing before a call:

• There is no screen with all the blocks an office manages. Each block is one account, with its number and its Excel file; whoever manages thirty opens thirty.
• It does not let every resident in: only those on the list can speak.
• It does not administer the block: no bills, no accounts, no minutes, no votes.
• It does not connect to the office's software or to the lift company's.
• It holds no inventory of installations, and it does not store inspection records or the building logbook.
• It does not replace the emergency services when a person is in danger.

Data is stored in the European Union. For an office, the reasonable thing is to try it in a single block, the one that generates the most calls, and decide with that Excel file in front of you. If what you lack is maintenance software with an inventory, start with CMMS; if it is only bringing order to faults, with fault management software.