Maintenance is where property management loses the most time quietly. A tenant reports a leak on WhatsApp, someone forwards it to a technician, nobody records when the visit happened, and the vendor bill turns up weeks later with no job attached to it. By month-end, nobody can say which property is costing the most to maintain.
We built the fix for RentEra Staff, the staff and admin app of the RentEra property management platform. Tenant requests, staff work sessions, vendors, and expenses run through one system, connected to the same leases and properties the tenant app uses.
What maintenance and work order software should do
- Capture every request: tenants raise maintenance requests in their app, so nothing starts in a chat thread.
- Dispatch the work: staff see each ticket, take the job, or assign it to a vendor.
- Verify the visit: a work session starts only when the staff member is at the property.
- Track cost: vendor bills and purchase receipts are uploaded against the job from the field.
- Close the loop: the tenant approves completion, so tickets don't sit open forever.
Why visit verification matters
When staff are paid by the hour, an unverified visit is a cost you can't check. A geofence check replaces calling the tenant to ask whether anyone came, and the session history gives you a record for every job. The same pattern works for field teams outside property: we covered it for trades in our paper dispatch guide.
What drives the scope
- Who does the work: in-house staff only, vendors only, or both.
- How staff are paid: hourly sessions with payouts add tracking and reporting on top of simple job status.
- Signal on site: basements and plant rooms often have none, so the app may need offline mode.
- Approvals: whether jobs above a set cost need a manager's sign-off before work starts.
- Connection to tenants: work orders are most useful when they start from a tenant app request and close with the tenant's approval.
How we build it
We build staff apps in Flutter for Android and iOS, on a Node.js and TypeScript backend with role-based access control. In RentEra, the staff app, tenant app, and admin tools share one backend, so a maintenance ticket looks the same to the tenant, the technician, and the manager.
