Property-manager software: defects, walk-throughs, TBS, administrator app
A community, a TBS and a tenement will not fit Excel after the fifth address. Property-manager software holds the building card, defect tickets and walk-throughs — with an administrator app in a basement with no signal.
A manager who runs a dozen condominiums, two TBS social-housing buildings and a few rental tenements is not shopping for a “proptech platform”. They want property-manager software in which the building card, the owner, the tenant, defect tickets and building walk-throughs live in one place. Excel and a WhatsApp group named “stairwell A” die on Saturday at 7 pm when a pipe bursts and nobody knows who holds the valve key, who is on duty and whether the ticket already exists. Building-administrator software then has one job: tell the truth about the site and give an administrator app that does not need a signal in the basement.
This is not a developer CRM and not a listings portal. Property CRM tracks which units are free to sell. Here units already have owners, resolutions, advances and a fault history. Property management as daily work is: who lives there, who pays, what broke, who will fix it, when the last walk-through happened and where the inspection protocol sits. If any of that lives in the caretaker’s notebook, the chair’s private phone or an inbox named biuro@, Saturday ends in a complaint, not a protocol.
The scale is not a marketing abstraction. Statistics Poland (GUS) reported that at the end of 2024 Poland had almost 16.0 million dwellings (+1.2% vs the end of 2023), 1,206.8 million m² of usable floor area and 61.2 million rooms. 10.8 million dwellings were in towns and cities, 5.1 million in rural areas. The stock grew by 186.5 thousand units. Every one of those dwellings has — or will have — someone who settles utilities, takes a leaking-valve ticket and watches the chimney inspection. Not all of them go to a professional manager. Those that do will not fit one spreadsheet once you pass a handful of addresses.
What property management actually is, not a “smart building” slide
In Polish law property management is an activity described in the Act of 21 August 1997 on real-estate management. The Act defines what management is, which activities it covers and on what terms a manager performs it — as a profession and as a business. The occupation used to require a state licence; after the 2014 deregulation the official-licence duty disappeared, but liability, the management contract and compulsory professional-indemnity insurance did not. The industry still debates standards, registers and a possible return of tighter regulation — that is a legislative process, not a button in an app. Software does not grant a licence and does not replace a lawyer. It holds the contract, the policy, the scope of work and a trail of who did what in the building.
In practice a manager (or an administrator employed by a manager, a community, a co-operative or a TBS) does three things at once. First: keep the building — inspections, maintenance, breakdowns, cleaning, greenery, the lift, the boiler. Second: serve people — owners, tenants, social tenants, community members who want to know what the advance paid for. Third: keep paper — resolutions, payment requests, supplier invoices, protocols, letters from the authority. Excel will carry one of those layers for a month. All three, on twelve addresses, after the first heating season, will not.
- Building card: address, stairwells and units, plant, lifts, boiler, parking, storage, grounds.
- Unit card: owner / co-owners, tenant, share, contact, meters, ticket history.
- Person card: SMS and email consents, channel, proxy, language, notices only or also outage alerts.
- Ticket: unit, place (stairwell, roof, lift), priority, photo, status, contractor, cost, protocol.
- Walk-through: route, checklist, date, person, exceptions, photos, resulting tasks.
- Document: resolution, contract, policy, inspection protocol, official letter — with a date and a building, not “in the 2023 folder”.
If any of those objects is missing from the data model, in a year you will bolt columns onto Excel or buy a second product “for resolutions”. Property-manager software only pays when those cards are one engine. The rest (a resident portal, a Play Store app, automatic utility settlement from a CSV) we add once the building card no longer lies.
Community, co-operative, TBS and a rental tenement are four products
The usual vendor mistake is one form “for property”. A housing community has unit owners, cost advances, a meeting and resolutions. A co-operative has members, shares, separated and unseparated units, often its own technical crew. A TBS — a social-housing company — builds and lets dwellings on social-housing rules, with a waiting list, a tenancy agreement and rent that is not a market rent. A private tenement has tenants, deposits, notices and voids. If you drop that into one “client–unit” queue, settlement and a lift-outage notice will explode on the same screen.
We do not quote a national headcount of TBS companies or units here, because that is not a number you invent from memory. What matters for software is how a TBS differs: the tenant is not a share owner, the waiting list and income criteria are a process rather than a note, and some duties come from municipal contracts and the social-housing rules. A “community” panel with voting by shares is the wrong tool. A “hotel” panel with nightly booking is also wrong. You need a social / TBS unit card, a tenancy, a payment request, a defect ticket and a walk-through of common parts.
- Community: owner, share, advance, resolution, meeting, sinking fund.
- Co-operative: member, contribution, separation, often own crews and a parts store.
- TBS: tenancy, queue, rent on the company’s rules, a municipal contract — no invented industry headcount.
- Private / commercial stock: tenancy, deposit, void, an invoice to a firm, not a façade resolution.
- A mix in one portfolio: the same building may hold owned units and TBS units, or retail on the ground floor.
That is why building-administrator software starts with: how many addresses, what title, who raises a defect (owner, tenant, security, caretaker) and who pays. Not with “IoT on every valve”. An owner / tenant / unit / building model that will not split when you add a second TBS or the first community with commercial units is the whole product for the first quarter.
Why Excel, email and WhatsApp fail after the fifth building
A typical day in a small management office: a lift call in the morning, a scan of the common-parts electricity bill at noon, a resident writing on Messenger that there has been no hot water for three days, and in the evening the chair asking for “a debtors list for tomorrow’s meeting”. The office (often one person) checks the advances spreadsheet, a folder of scans, a group named “faults stair B” and the caretaker’s private phone — the caretaker is on leave. At the same moment someone else takes the same ticket on another channel. Two call-outs for one leaking cistern is not “commitment”. It is a cost the management lump sum does not show.
- The same ticket in three channels: email, phone, WhatsApp — three statuses, no owner.
- Keys, boiler codes and the alarm instruction in the notebook of the person who is off sick.
- A walk-through “by eye” with no checklist: the roof was “sometime in May”, the chimney protocol sits in the previous administrator’s drawer.
- Utility settlement in a workbook nobody can open without the former bookkeeper’s password.
- An attendance sheet on paper — then a fight over whether a resolution even passed.
- A snow-clearing invoice with no building and no works order — accounts guess which community pays.
- The resident does not know anyone accepted the ticket, so they call a third time and post on the community Facebook.
Excel does not block a double call-out. Messenger does not know a lift fault has a different SLA from a stairwell bulb. A generic e-commerce helpdesk does not know the unit, the share and that a ticket from unit 17 is about a riser that also serves 7 and 27. Purpose-built property-manager software treats the building as a resource with parts, not as “a client with a ticket”.
The building card is the single truth — everything else is a view
A building has an address, a precinct, a land register (if you keep it), storeys, stairwells, dwellings and commercial units, parking, storage, a playground, bins, connections, a boiler room, a hydrophone, lifts with numbers and inspection dates, security, CCTV, standing contractors (cleaning, greenery, snow, lift service). That is not an “investment postcard”. It is the dictionary that tickets, walk-throughs, invoices and resolutions use. If “stair A” means something else in another file, the caretaker will drive to the wrong place.
A unit inherits the building and adds: number, floor, area, share, meters, owners, a tenant if any, a proxy, notes (a dog, reduced mobility — only if someone declared it and you have a basis to keep it). Status in a community is not a developer CRM sales status. Here a unit is separated or not, in arrears or not, under works or not. In a TBS a unit is vacant, let, under notice, or in works after handover. Mixing those dictionaries in one “status” column ends with someone “selling” a social tenancy.
Only on that card do a resident portal and SMS make sense. Otherwise you will send “water off tomorrow” to people in another building because two workbook tabs got swapped. That is the cheapest scandal you do not want on the management office’s Google reviews.
Defect tickets are a helpdesk, not a Messenger group
Defect tickets are the heart of the day. A resident, tenant or guard reports: a leak, a failure, a smell, a hazard, dirt. The system must take the ticket from a portal, email, a phone call (the office types it) and from the administrator app in the field. Each ticket gets a number, a building, a place, a priority, an SLA, an owner and a status: new / accepted / in progress / waiting for parts / waiting for access / closed / rejected. Without a number there is no “I already reported this on Thursday”.
It is the same engine we use in helpdesk / field service: ticket, priority, visit, protocol, photo, time. The place dictionary differs (stairwell, riser, lift, roof) and the reporter is often a share owner, not a B2B client with an SLA on a printer. “Lift down, people with reduced mobility in the block” must not sit in the same queue as “please change the bulb by the bins, it has been dark for a week” — the second matters, but not at 7 pm on a Saturday.
- Intake: channel, person, unit or common part, description, photo, whether there is access and when.
- Triage in the office or by the on-call: priority, plant fault vs cleanliness vs a post-works complaint.
- Works order: own crew or a contractor; estimated cost; community, unit or contractor warranty.
- Visit: slot, who goes, which keys, whether the resident must be in.
- Protocol: what was done, parts, after photos, a signature or a portal confirmation.
- Close and tell the reporter — not silence that produces a third call.
- If it is a repeat fault on the same riser — a link, not a brand-new ticket “as it comes”.
The resident sees their tickets and status, not the internal argument over who pays. The administrator in the field sees the day’s queue, addresses, keys and the unit history. The office sees SLA and cost. Three views of one ticket card. If you only have an awarie@ inbox, you have a mail queue, not a helpdesk.
Building walk-throughs: a checklist, not “I was there and it was fine”
Building walk-throughs are the only thing that catches a roof leak before it hits the top-floor ceiling. A typical round: stairwells, lighting, bins, grounds, playground, garage, plant rooms, the roof (when access is safe), boiler, hydrophone, notice boards. Without a checklist a walk-through is a stroll. With a checklist and a photo it is a protocol you can defend at a meeting when someone says “nobody has looked in here for six months”.
The field app works like our other field-service pieces: large buttons, a photo, a tick, offline in the basement and the underground garage. Android first — that is how most Polish caretakers work. iPhone when it is really in the crew. We do not force a resident to install an app to report a valve; a page is enough. The administrator app is for people who walk and fix, not for a chair who wants balances once a month.
- A walk-through template per building type (large-panel block, tenement, TBS with a lift, a service pavilion).
- Route and frequency: stairwells daily, roof / boiler weekly, a full protocol monthly.
- An exception becomes a ticket or a task at once — it does not die in a “to sort” note.
- A “this is how it should look” photo for a new hire, not a verbal briefing in the car park.
- A check-in at the building (GPS or a code in the boiler room) as a signal the round happened — not metre-by-metre surveillance; GPS lies in a garage.
- Close of the round: date, person, exception count, open tasks.
Money, KSeF and e-Deliveries for KRS companies
The manager settles advances on running costs, a sinking fund, utilities, sometimes a special fund. The operations system knows the assessment, the rate, individual meters and balances. It does not replace the community’s accounts package or the bookkeeping firm. It makes sure a request went out, a payment hit the right unit and the chair sees arrears before the meeting, not “Friday night in a workbook that broke after a sort”.
When you raise invoices from the panel (commercial units, extra services, market lettings), KSeF is no longer “the bookkeeper’s problem in the background”. From 2026 a VAT invoice between taxable persons goes through Poland’s National e-Invoice System. Timetable from ksef.podatki.gov.pl: 1 February 2026 for businesses whose 2024 sales (including VAT) exceeded PLN 200 million; 1 April 2026 for everyone else. Consumer invoices in KSeF are optional. If all sales already go through a certified bookkeeping tool — stay on it. We build an integration when your panel issues the invoice.
If the management office is a company on the National Court Register (or you run a TBS, a co-operative, another legal person), official mail is no longer only an envelope on the mat. e-Deliveries (e-Doręczenia) are mandatory for entities registering in the KRS from 1 January 2025 already at registration, and for businesses entered in the KRS before that date — from 1 April 2025 (biznes.gov.pl and the Ministry of Digital Affairs). Other non-public KRS entities, including foundations and associations, sit in the same calendar. The app does not replace the e-Deliveries box. It can keep a copy of the letter on the building card, the inbound date, the reply deadline and a task for a named person.
Package software or a custom stack
Mature Polish and foreign suites exist for communities and administration. Some will carry advances, resolutions and a unit base. Some are heavy, old or weak in the field. A per-unit / per-community licence grows with the portfolio. Custom property-manager software pays when you mix communities, TBS and lettings; you want your own administrator app under your brand; the resident portal should sit on your domain; field and settlement should be one stack; code and data should stay with you when the vendor changes. Comparison: package or custom software. One community, 20 units, a volunteer chair and a caretaker on the phone — a good spreadsheet or a light SaaS is enough. We will say so.
We do not replace community bookkeeping or the land register. We do not grant a manager’s licence and we do not rule on whether a resolution is valid. We build operations: card, ticket, walk-through, document, balance. Accounts and the lawyer stay where they are — with an export, not with a panel pretending to be a full ledger.
How we implement without killing the heating season
We do not migrate five years of twenty workbooks in week one. We set buildings, units, people, ticket and walk-through templates, roles. We bring balances and open faults. The old mail channel stays for a month as an intake into the same helpdesk. After two weeks you see whether the caretaker clicks in the basement and whether the office still keeps a parallel notebook “just in case”. Only then: the resident portal, utility import, resolutions, KSeF, a second crew.
Describe building and unit counts, whether you run communities, a co-operative or a TBS, and whether the pain is tickets, walk-throughs or settlement. A quote for property-manager software and an administrator app in 24 hours — first a building card that does not lie, not a platform for every estate in Poland.
Sources we do not stretch
Dwelling stock: GUS, Housing economy in 2024. The profession: Real Estate Management Act — described generally; the app does not replace a licence, PI insurance or an amendment. TBS as social-housing companies (tenancy, not a share); no unsourced headcount. KSeF: ksef.podatki.gov.pl. e-Deliveries for KRS entities: biznes.gov.pl and gov.pl/cyfryzacja. The rest is implementation practice, not invented fire or defect averages.
Frequently asked questions
- Will this replace Excel and WhatsApp from Monday?
- From a week, not from Monday. Buildings, units, tickets and the walk-through come first. Excel stops taking new lines when the caretaker clicks in the field. Old mail stays as an intake, not a second truth.
- Can one system serve a community and a TBS?
- The same building-card, ticket and walk-through engine — yes. The dictionary (owner vs tenant, resolution vs tenancy, advance vs rent) must be separate. You do not vote by shares in a TBS and you do not run a social waiting list in an ownership community on the same form.
- Must a resident install an app to raise a defect?
- No. A browser portal or a phone call that the office types in is enough. The app is for the administrator and caretaker. A resident app pays in a large stock, not in 40 units.
- Will the system issue KSeF invoices?
- If the invoice is born in your panel and the duty applies — we integrate. If you already issue everything from a certified bookkeeping tool, stay there. Dates: ksef.podatki.gov.pl.
- What about e-Deliveries?
- KRS companies have their own dates (new from 1 Jan 2025, already registered — from 1 Apr 2025). The panel does not replace the box. It can keep the letter on the building and a reply deadline. Source: biznes.gov.pl.
- How many buildings will it take?
- From a few addresses to a portfolio with separate stocks and permissions. Each building is its own card. A second TBS or another community is the same engine, another dictionary and its own chart of accounts.
- Do you do full community books and court debt recovery?
- No. Balances, requests, payment import — yes. Ledgers, JPK and claims — the bookkeeper and a law firm. We export; we do not pretend the panel is a judge.
- Does the field app work in a basement and a garage?
- Yes — offline like our other field-service builds: local save, send on LTE. GPS lies in a garage, so we also give a list and a boiler-room code, not only a geofence.
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